[NewsPoster]

You've got documents to scan and you've got a phone with a great camera: it is surely a no-brainier that you should be able to use your iPhone for scanning. Yet it's a no-brainier that takes a lot of thought and work on the part of app developers if you're to get something useful out of it. With this latest release, Readdle aims to make Scanner Pro 7.0 more useful than ever and specifically so because of its new OCR features.

You're going to see phrases like 'more useful' and words like 'excellent' because that is indeed what Scanner Pro 7.0 is. However, read both with this in mind: it is excellent and more useful than ever –– for an iPhone scanner. If you need strong quality scans of documents, this is not and never will be the way to do it.

There are desktop, sheet-feeding and flatbed scanners aplenty that cannot fail to do better than Scanner Pro 7.0 simply because of how they work. With them, you control the scan and since they all take longer than iPhone-based scanners, you have the time to take and retake scans until you're happy. With any iPhone-based scanner, the more typical use is that you're scanning something on the go and probably in a hurry. Think less industrial espionage, as that's illegal and you're naughty to even suggest it, and more your having limited time with important material. We scanned over a thousand pages of TV scripts using a previous version of Scanner Pro and did so in order to maximise the very specifically limited time we had in an archive. Scan the material in the day, read it overnight, know where the research needed us to go tomorrow. Of that thousand or more pages with a previous version of the software, we probably got 900 to 950 very good scans, maybe 45 passable ones and only a very few duds. In every case the duds were our fault: moving before we'd finished photographing the page, for instance. We'd say, though, that 900 good scans is a bit of a record and it says a lot about our steady hands and the fact that our limited time was still several hours.

To test out Scanner Pro 7.0 we put it to work on some much faster turnaround jobs: we scanned part of the archive of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England and did so because that genuinely helped a real job we had on. So this wasn't a concocted or contorted test, it was a real job and it was under severe time constraints. Scanner Pro 7.0 was a boon for two things. The first was that it can automatically scan pages as you put them in front of it and the second was that has this OCR feature: it has Optical Character Recognition. That means you can photograph a document and Scanner Pro 7.0 will turn the image of letters into actual text that you can copy and paste into other applications. That works and that works fine. The automatic scanning wasn't so great: we did do this in the most enormous rush, deliberately, and we would find under pressure that the automatic scanning sometimes didn't fire. Other times we would put the phone down on the desk while we opened the next archive document and Scanner Pro 7.0 would automatically scan the desk. There's a button for switching between automatic and manual scanning and after a short while we were pressing that a lot.

Nothing we scanned was as impressive as the scripts we did before but all of what we scanned proved useful later in the job. We got the material we were asked to, then we took it away and read it all at our leisure. That's the use of Scanner Pro 7.0, that's the worth of it. Scanner Pro 7 requires iOS 9.0 or higher and costs $3 in the App Store. Who is Scanner Pro 7 for: Researchers or anyone needing to grab a lot of text information in a hurry. The company also points out that it's good for capturing receipts. Who is Scanner Pro 7 not for: Archivists and researchers who want to preserve documents through scanning: they have no choice, they've got to go to the desktop or flatbed type of scanner instead. -William Gallagher (@WGallagher) Readers: do you have an app that you'd like to see us review? Developers: do you want us to take a look at your app? Send your suggestions to our Tips email.