FairScan – PDF Scanner & OCR

fairscan.org

About this app

FairScan is a simple and respectful PDF scanner with no ads, no tracking, and no built-in cloud. It's 100% free and open source.

SIMPLE

FairScan focuses on what a PDF scanner should do well.
With FairScan, you get a clean PDF in just a few seconds:
- Easy flow: scan, review if needed, save or share instantly.
- Clear, distraction-free interface.
- Automatic document detection, crop, and image enhancement.
- Chrome and other Android apps can use FairScan to scan documents and receive a PDF instantly.

RESPECTFUL

FairScan was built for its users, not for profit:
- Privacy: FairScan doesn't upload or sync your scans. All processing is done offline. No built-in cloud, no account, no trackers.
- Focus: no ads, no nagging to upgrade, only what you need.
- Freedom: no watermarks, no page limits, no restrictions on sharing.
- Transparency: open source code, open to review.

MAIN FEATURES

- Multi-page PDF creation
- Fast and automatic document detection and perspective correction
- Automatic shadow reduction and image enhancement
- Text recognition (OCR) and searchable PDF generation
- Choose where one-tap save stores your PDF, including folders provided by compatible cloud storage apps (such as Nextcloud or Google Drive)

TEXT RECOGNITION (OCR)

When you scan documents, the app can recognize text in more than 100 languages (powered by Tesseract technology):
- Create searchable PDFs from scanned documents.
- Search text inside your scanned PDFs.
- Copy recognized text to any other app.

MINIMAL PERMISSIONS

The app requires strictly minimal permissions:
- Camera: to scan documents
- Internet: used only for optional OCR language downloads. Apart from that, the app works completely offline.
- On Android 9 and below: storage (to save PDFs to Downloads)

HOW FAIRSCAN IS MADE

FairScan is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) PDF scanner for Android.
The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/pynicolas/FairScan

Its goal is not to make a profit, but to provide a simple and respectful solution to a common need.
Learn more about the project and how you can support it on the website: https://fairscan.org/

For questions and support, please send a mail to [e-mail]

Ratings and reviews

A nice, quick, minimal scanner, as others have noted. Office lens depreciation led me here. It's nice, but I do wish there was an option to turn off auto processing and just put the raw images into a pdf. Edge detection can be a little wonky sometimes, especially with handwritten documents.

Simple to use, and files are saved to the device (not to the cloud). It would be nice to be able to tweak the capture - I noticed it tended to cut-off the edges sometimes if the paper wasn't perfectly flat (as happens for mailed items). Another bonus is no ads, which more than makes up for some of its shortcomings.

Hands down the best scanning app ever. Period. Single or multi-page scanning, colour or black and white, easily enable camera flash, import pre-existing photos to scan, on-device OCR in all languages (see settings), simple rotate and crop after scanning, rename the scan before sending it to any other app or cloud drive without having to save a copy to your phone first, no ads, no features hidden behind a paywall. Shockingly underrated.

What’s new

New filter: black & white.
New app translations: Persian and Tamil.