By Graham K. Rogers

When OS X was updated to 10.2, Jaguar, there was a fairly large introduction at the Siam Discovery Centre. At 6pm on the dot we all lined up and the distributors started to sell the boxes to the patient users. I was out of there by about 18:20 and off home to install.

Before this, however, there was time for socializing and I had a chat with George Mann who had written the first Mac columns in the Bangkok Post Database.

I was complaining that, having switched to OS X, the scanner I had bought had not driver, so to capture anything I had to switch back to System 9. "Why bother?" he asked, "Most images we need can just be taken with a camera and cropped."

This item first appeared on AMITIAE on 15 June last year. The article and the app have now been updated.

Outline

However, unless one is super-steady and accurate with the downward view there is always some distortion. For most cases this will not matter. However, I have found a useful free app, Genius Scan - PDF Scanner, which does a surprisingly good job and it has a couple of nice surprises built in. It has now been updated (see below). Between the earlier review and now, the icon for the app has also been changed.

Genius Scan - PDF Scanner

When we use an image, the app goes into "detecting" mode and the algorithm used puts an orange box fairly accurately round the text area. Using the touch screen we can move the four corners around to change the box size. When satisfied we press, Select. The area is cropped, perspective is fixed and the image is automatically enhanced. There are three options available for further enhancements: none, black and white document, and color document. The black and white selection uses thresholding and if there is any shadowing it may show black.

I tried this app with several types of input, starting with the crossword in the Sunday newspaper. I was not concentrating on this task fully and the image was taken at an odd angle, but the software fixed the rotation, cropped accurately and produced a fair scan of the original.

I tried also with a 100 baht note at an angle on a table. It cropped properly, fixed the angle and (in enhancement) smoothed out some of the creasing. An old book with browned pages was also accurately rendered, although this was where there was some shadowing introduced at the corners: nothing more than some Xerox or fax machines might do.

On the iPad 2, I did not think results were as good and the accuracy was considerably less. Using the same page from a book I had to improve the lighting in the room before getting close to the output that the iPhone had produced. The app is not optimised for the iPad and displays in the x1 and x2 formats. I also found it less easy to make a scan with this because of its size. This app is far better suited to the smaller device. A camera improvement, such as is expected in the coming iPad 3, may produce better output.

I was able to save the output or export as an image. However, we may also save as a "document" which produces a PDF file as we may expect with the app name. This has been updated and there is now no need to save to a document first. The PDF may also be exported (in a range of sizes) by email or to "other apps." When I selected this I was offered 10 apps that are able to handle the file, including iBooks (putting it straight into the book-case), Docs to Go, Stanza and three printing apps.

In the Settings we may turn on wifi sharing so the document may be transferred directly to a computer quite easily. One of those that I did transfer was a PDF made from an iPhone capture of the screen while I was writing this article. When viewed in the browser on my Mac the text was easily readable and no words were missing. Much flexibility here.

Other settings are for: default enhancement (Auto, None, Black and White, or Color); paper size (Letter, A4, Fit to Image; orientation (portrait, landscape); and export plugins - only Twitter was available back in June, but my Settings panel also shows Facebook now. There is also an upgrade setting here. The pro app, Genius Scan + allows direct uploads to Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs. It also removes the advertisements: a bar at the bottom of some screens.

Update

• By default the first letter of a document file is capitalized;
• A fix for a bug that would prevent documents form appearing and required a restart of the app;
• Resolution of a situation that crashed the app after several scans were taken in a row;
• Better error messages for Evernote and Dropbox;
• Fix title of PDF images (appeared as Untitled in iBooks)

The app page also notes the updates that were made to the earlier 2.3 update:

• Export of a single page as PDF (no need to save to a document);
• Users can now print from the iPhone to an AirPrint printer, which the developer suggests allows the app to create photocopies.

Comment

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.