Nowadays, it’s crucial to have all your hardcopy information stored digitally as well. Flooding, house fires, simple carelessness, all these are threats to books, transcripts and other paper you have stored away or lying around. Furthermore, many departments and offices nowadays require you to hand in forms and proofs digitally.

So what do you do if you have a certain document in print only? What if you want to use a large quote from a printed book? Or pictures from an illustrated book? Then, you have to scan the paper, document or book.

Most scanners help you to angle your document, but even when using the document feeder, your scan may come out crooked. Don’t you worry, we have a solution for you: de-skew your scans!

If the document has been scanned into a PDF, then using Adobe Acrobat 9.0, you should be able to deskew the document as follows: 1. Open the document into Adobe Acorbat Pro 9.0 2. Click 'Document' from the top menu 3. Select Optimized Scanned PDF Note that Deskew is set to automatic so just press the OK button and the tilt should be corrected. Deskew and Straighten PDF using Optimize Scanned PDF Open the PDF you wish to straighten in case it is not already open. Open the Document Processing panel and then click on Optimize Scanned PDF: To straighten the image without OCRing or changing compression, do the following: A) Deselect “Apply Adaptive Compression”. Your cursor will change to a crosshair. By default this button is not in any toolbars. To learn how to add it to a toolbar, see Customizing Toolbars. Click two points on a line that should be horizontal in the PDF. The Page Setup dialog box will reappear with a preview of the.

Fix Crooked Scans

Using OCR, it’s very easy to extract text from a scanned page of a book. But what if your paper was moved while scanning or the pages of a larger book didn’t come out all straight as you need them to?

Find out more about Optical Character Recognition.

A function of the Online-Convert.com PDF converter can help you with this. The “deskew” option makes sure that the text of your scanned page is aligned neatly and gets rid of black lines that usually accompany crooked scans. Before we jump into the quick tutorial, however, let’s have a look at the results of a deskew conversion.

What Does Deskew Do?

To show what the process of deskewing looks like, check out the table below. It shows one of the Online-Convert.com test files that have been scanned slightly crooked. The black lines on the left side of the scan are the clearest indication of the crookedness, alongside with the text. After deskew, you can see a big, visual improvement.

The images are taken from screenshots of the PDF files opened in Adobe Reader.

Crooked Scan

After Deskew

How To Fix A Crooked Scan?

Here’s what you need to deskew your scan:

There are only two things you need to deskew your photos:

the scan (usually a PDF or JPG file)
a PDF converter

1. Upload your document

Simply upload your document from your hard drive. You can also provide a link or use any document saved on Dropbox or Google Drive.

2. Check “Deskew”

In the box that shows the optional settings for a PDF conversion, you can find the “Deskew” option. Just tick the box.

3. Convert your file

All that is left to do is to click on “Convert file“. The rest will be handled by Online-Convert.com. Depending on your browser, the fixed document will be automatically downloaded on the next page. If not, save it manually.

Want to get in touch with us? Hit us up on our social media channels!