How to scan and upload hardcopy recipes online.

Learn how to use a mobile scanner to digitize your paper recipes.

Do you have a collection of recipe clippings, handwritten recipe notes, pages of annotated cookbooks? It can be hard to keep it all straight when your favorite recipes are all over the map. Learn how to digitize your archives so that your top hits are all organized and available at the click of a button.

Scan your recipes, without the scanner.

You don’t need a special recipe scanner or big, expensive equipment to digitize your recipes. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Collect your recipes. Make sure you’ve got all your favorites ready to go. Separate the printed ones from the handwritten ones. This will come in handy in step 3.
2. Download a mobile scanning app. With an app like Adobe Scan, all you need to do is take a photo of your recipe and the app will scan it into a PDF right from your phone.
3. Convert your handwriting. You can convert any handwritten scans into more legible documents through the scanning app, too. The app will read the document with technology called optical character recognition (OCR) and convert the handwriting into machine-readable text. This extra step will make your handwritten notes as readable as your printed notes.
4. Save, organize, and share. Save your PDFs to a folder on your desktop and organize them according to your own tastes. Since each recipe is now a PDF, they’ll keep their formatting and legibility regardless of who you share them with.

Do more with your PDFs.

Learn more about how you can use Adobe Acrobat to create PDFs, reorder pages, merge PDFs, and convert various file types to PDF that you can reference and share, anytime, anywhere.