How to Scan a Letter with Your iPhone
Unfold the letter, flatten the creases as much as you can, and capture it with PDF Scanner in Document mode on a dark surface — then square it with perspective fix and export a PDF. The specific problem with letters is the folds: each crease catches a line of shadow, and thin paper lets the writing on the back show through, so even side light and a sheet of dark paper underneath do more for the result than any editing step.
Tools used: Crop & perspective fixRotateBrightness & contrastOCR text recognitionPDF conversionJPG export
Step by step
-
Unfold and flatten the creases
Press the letter flat and, if it has been folded for years, leave it under a book for a few minutes first. Every raised crease becomes a dark line across the finished scan.
-
Put dark paper underneath thin sheets
Airmail and onionskin paper are translucent, so writing from the reverse side shows through. A dark sheet under the letter cuts the show-through and gives edge detection a clean boundary at the same time.
-
Light it from the side
Side light keeps your own shadow off the page. It also keeps the remaining crease shadows shallow instead of carving hard lines through the text.
-
Capture with all four corners in frame
Hold the phone parallel to the page. Letter paper is large enough that a slight tilt shows clearly along the margins.
-
Straighten and adjust
Crop & perspective fix squares the sheet. Brightness & contrast brings up faded ink, and helps typewritten or dot-matrix letters where the strike is uneven.
-
Export as a single PDF
A multi-page letter, or a letter plus its envelope, should be captured into one document and exported once so the correspondence stays together as a single PDF.
Frequently asked
- How do I scan a letter that will not stay unfolded?
- Weigh the corners down with anything flat and heavy, or hold two edges and shoot from directly above. Where a fold still stands proud, move so the light runs along the crease rather than across it, which flattens the shadow it casts.
- The writing from the other side shows through. What helps?
- Slide a sheet of dark paper or card under the letter before capturing. That alone removes most show-through. Afterwards, careful contrast adjustment can suppress what remains, though pushing it too far also thins the writing you want.
- Can OCR turn an old letter into text?
- Typed and printed letters recognize well. Handwritten correspondence is unreliable, especially in older cursive hands — the scan is trustworthy, the recognized text needs proofreading.
- Should I scan the envelope too?
- For anything you might need to prove — a postmark, a return address, a dated notice — yes. Capture it as an extra page in the same document so it exports inside the same PDF.
- Is my correspondence uploaded anywhere?
- No. PDF Scanner captures and processes on the iPhone using Apple's built-in frameworks, and letter images are not sent to a server.
Last updated 2026-07-28