A handout, a receipt, a signed contract, a few pages of a book: on iPhone and iPad, the Scan button puts paper into a note. However many pages you scan, they go in as one card.
Scanning
Put the cursor where the scan should go, open Attachments on the toolbar above the keyboard and tap Scan. The camera opens on Apple's document scanner, which finds the edges of the page, straightens it and takes the shot. Scan every page, then tap Save.
To start from the home screen, the Scan a Document control and the Quick Capture widget open Grape on a new note with the scanner up, see Put Grape on your iPhone home screen.
The scan card
The pages sit in the note as one card: the first page, with a small stack of paper behind it and a pill that says how many pages there are, like 20 pages. A scan of a single page looks like a picture. Tap the card to see the pages full screen, and swipe to go from one page to the next.
The three dots at the top right of the page open the card's menu, the same as on a voice recording: Extract Text, below, and Delete. In a note you can only view, the menu has Extract Text alone.
Reading the text
Tap the three dots at the top right of the scan and choose Extract Text. Grape reads the words on every page with your phone's own text recognition and shows them in the Text from Scan sheet:
- Copy puts the text on the clipboard
- Insert puts it into the note right under the scan, with the lines of each paragraph joined back together, the way a transcript goes in under its recording
The reading happens on your device: it works offline, on every plan, and nothing is uploaded. Grape reads a scan in the background a moment after you make it, and the scans already in your notes a little after the app opens, so Extract Text usually opens on the text at once.
Finding the words on the pages
The words on a scan's pages are found before you insert them. Search finds the note by a word that is only on a page and shows the page it is on, and find in note counts the matches on the pages, rings the card and shows the words around each match. The text is kept on the device that read it and is not part of the note until you insert it.
On Android and desktop
Scanning uses Apple's document scanner, so the Scan button is on iPhone and iPad only. A scan syncs like a picture does. On Android it shows as the same card, and Extract Text reads it with the phone's own text recognition there too.
On desktop the card shows the pages. Double click it to page through them with Previous and Next. On a Mac, the three dots at the top right of the card hold Extract Text and Delete: the Mac reads the pages with its own text recognition, offline, and the Text from Scan window has Copy and Insert. Search and find in note reach the words on a Mac too. On Windows and Linux reading the text is not there yet, so insert it on your phone and it arrives with the note.
Ask the AI about it
The chat looks at the pages of a scan the way it looks at the other images in a note, so you can ask what a handout says or turn a receipt into a table. Each page counts as one image toward the chat's limits, so for a long scan, insert its text first and the chat reads every page.
Older scans
Scans made before scan cards came in went into the note a picture a page, and they stay that way.
Where scans live
Each page is stored like a picture, in your local library with the note. With sync on, the pages travel to your other devices and count toward your attachment storage the way pictures do. A note with a scan in it cannot be locked, the same as a note with a picture.