Use your phone’s camera to preserve important documents with these PDF conversion tools How to use your phone’s camera to create a PDF document on Android for free

We’ve all been there, trying to sign a lease after moving to a new city or sending off the documents required for a financial application. PDFs are a persistent part of life these days, even if they might feel a bit dated, and coordinating the conversion from real-world paper to a PDF file can be obnoxious, but your phone can actually handle it for you. In fact, you may not even need to install a separate app to do it.

There are plenty of ways you can generate PDFs in a pinch, and probably a hundred apps that claim to do it, but we’ll be focusing on two good ways from two specific and well-known apps to generate PDFs from real-world documents: Google Drive and Adobe Scan.

Since each has its own advantages, you can decide for yourself, but I’d recommend Drive for making a PDF with your phone’s camera, and Adobe Scan for making a PDF from existing images you’ve already taken.

Google Drive

The reasons to use Google Drive for your PDF needs are:

• It’s simple and easy.
• You probably don’t need to install anything, most phones come with it.
• It syncs PDFs that it creates to Google Drive, a boon to G Suite-based productivity and cloud storage.
• Perspective can be corrected automatically.

Creating PDFs in Google Drive on Android is simple:

Left: The floating action button opens a menu (right) which includes the “Scan” option for creating PDFs.

Just open the app, tap the “+” floating action button in the corner, and in the resulting menu, select “scan.”

Line up, review, and tweak the photos you take for PDFs in Drive. 

Line up the document in the viewfinder, trying to make sure all four corners are visible and that your view is mostly flat, and take the photo. (Holding the document with your hands while scanning is possible, but you’ll need to be careful.) After a bit of processing, Drive then gives you the option to review and accept or reject the photo before importing it into the PDF. Tap the big checkmark when you think the photo is good enough, and…