[heydonovan]

I hate PDF's with a passion. Not once have I ever wanted to use one. All the pinching and zooming, such a waste of time. I'm giving this a shot next time I need one, the whole scanner thing needs to go. Are we stuck in the 90's?

Just bought another rental and it was an ordeal trying to find a scanner. Tried the college near me, was denied as you have to be a student. The library is closed down apparently. FedEx didn't have one. The one at the Office Depot was broken. I ended up driving 30 miles to a friends house to use theirs, which required driver upgrades since nobody had used it in a year. I don't understand the point of jumping through all these hoops.

I feel the same with credit card signatures, completely useless and has never once helped me with identity theft or fraudulent transactions. Now I just draw a horizontal line or smiley face.

[detritus]

If you have a basic handle on a GUI Bitmap editor such as Photoshop or GIMP, and you have a hi-resolution phone, you can just take a photo of the sheet as parallel as you can manage and then create a document that is the same dimensions and then use the warp tool to fit the likely skewed photograph to the exact digital document.

[post-it]

There's lots of apps that do it for you too. Scannable is one.

[detritus]

ha! As soon as I wrote that I thought "there's an app in that" and started mentally mapping out how it could work. I figured it'd need to be simple as possible, and even considered using the user's location to preëmpt the paper format choice :)

I'm not an app developer. Probably for the best.

[maupin]

> All the pinching and zooming, such a waste of time.

Sounds like what you really hate are mobile device displays.

[lucb1e]

When is the last time you had to pinch and zoom on a website? Text can reflow perfectly well, if you give the renderer the necessary information. With PDF, similar to PNG, you're specifically telling the renderer to put this pixel exactly over there and nowhere else, so it cannot nicely make it all be readable comfortably.

If mobile devices required zooming and panning to read anything, they'd not be popular at all, so they're apparently not where the problem lies.

[quickthrower2]

A4 is the issue. Mobile friendly pdfs could be done, just stick bigger text on each page like a kindle does.

[lucb1e]

But then you have super narrow views on desktop, we don't want that either. What's wrong with just using the formats we already have for reflowable text, why bother trying to make PDF into something it's fundamentally made not to do?

[quickthrower2]

Yeah good point. I think it’s that adobe stranglehold. “Never got fired for…” kind of thing.

[ihattendorf]

Do you hate PDF's or do you hate scanned documents? How else should we send text or image documents in a portable format, MS Word? Google Docs?

[BlueTemplar]

(m)HTML (aka .eml). And it even supports multimedia !

[ahoka]

Just take a photo next time, you can use Office Lens or Apple Notes.

[scintill76]

Also Files on iOS has a document scanner hidden in the … menu.

[koliber]

Smart phone scanning apps are incredible. I’ve ditched a flatbed years ago and solely rely on my iPhone. It works like magic. The quality is good-to-great, and it fits well with my workflow. Worth the ten bucks or so investment.

[marcellus23]

Don't even need to spend $10 — the scanning is built into iOS, you can get to it from the Files or the Notes app, or even from your Mac (right-click somewhere and "Import from iPhone or iPad").

[martneumann]

>Are we stuck in the 90's?

Since we accept signatures as proof of identity, we are really stuck in 3,000 B.C. [0]

[0] https://blog.thegrizzlylabs.com/2020/11/history-of-signature...

[wildrhythms]

I was told by a convenience store clerk that it's best to simply write "SEE ID" in place of a credit card signature. In the event the card is stolen, or there is some doubt as to its user, perhaps the criminal would be stupid enough to actually show their ID.

[space_ghost]

Dropbox's mobile app includes a document scanning feature that seems to work well.