Norvela Scanner — Support

Scanning your first page

Tap New Scan, point the camera at a page on a contrasting surface, and let it find the edges. It will shoot automatically when the page is steady, or you can tap the shutter. Keep going for as many pages as you like, then tap Save.

You land on Adjust & Confirm, where you can rotate a page, delete one, pick a filter and change the name. The app suggests a name from the largest heading it found, so a quarterly report usually arrives already called one.

Bringing in a photo or a PDF

The camera is not the only way in. Next to New Scan there is an import button offering Choose photos and Import a file. A PDF comes in one page at a time and is read exactly like a photograph, which is how you turn something somebody emailed you into editable text.

Inside an open document, the ⋯ menu has Add pages, Add from Photos and Add from Files for appending to what you already have.

Getting a better scan

• Light beats everything. Flat, even light with no shadow across the page does more for accuracy than any setting.
• Use a contrasting surface. White paper on a white table is the one case edge detection genuinely struggles with. A dark table fixes it.
• Try B&W on a faded receipt. The filter is an adaptive threshold — it works out the paper's brightness in each part of the page separately, so it copes with a shadow across one corner. It also makes the file much smaller.
• Take the blur warning seriously. If a page comes back marked This one looks blurry, the app checked the lens and thinks it was smudged. It will still save — it is a suggestion, not a refusal — but it is worth a retake while you still have the paper.

The text, and fixing it

Open a document and choose Text. Everything read off the page is there and editable — tap in and correct anything. Your edit is what every export uses from then on. Copy All puts the whole page on the clipboard.

If a page read badly, or you changed its filter afterwards, use Read this page again from the ⋯ menu. It re-reads the page as it now looks. Anything you typed yourself is kept.

Tables and spreadsheets

When a page has a real table on it, the Text tab shows a small chip saying how many rows and columns were found, and Spreadsheet becomes available in Export. Each table becomes a sheet, and figures are written as numbers rather than as text that looks like numbers — so Numbers and Excel can total a column without you retyping it.

A page of running prose will not offer a spreadsheet, and the export sheet says so rather than producing a one-column file. Ruled tables are recognized far more reliably than columns held apart by spaces.

Markup and signatures

The Markup tab draws straight onto the page: pen, highlighter and eraser for freehand, plus arrows, circles, boxes, lines, underline, strikeout, text boxes, sticky notes, stamps and a date. Pick a color and a thickness from the bar; undo and redo are next to them. A finger works as well as a Pencil.

Add signature in the ⋯ menu opens a signing panel — the one light surface in the app, because a signature is drawn in dark ink on light paper. Sign and tap Done. If the page has a signature line, the signature is sized to that line and set on it, and the date and your printed name go into their own blanks when the form has them. Otherwise it lands at the lower right. Either way it is an ordinary mark: drag it or resize it if it is not quite where you want it.

Everything you draw is stored separately from the photograph, so the original page is never altered. Exports composite the two together.

Filling in a form

Fill in About Me once, from Settings: your name, address, phone and email. It stays on this device and is never filled in for you.

When a scan looks like a form, the document offers Looks like a form — fill it in? You can also choose Fill in from About Me from the ⋯ menu on any page. The app lists the blanks it found and the answer it would put in each, and nothing goes onto the page until you choose which ones to add. What it adds is ordinary text you can move or delete.

Exporting and sharing

Tap the share icon in an open document. Eight formats:

• PDF Document — looks exactly like the page, and the text is selectable and searchable because it is layered invisibly behind the image. This is the right answer most of the time.
• Word Document — real headings, lists and tables. Opens in Word or Pages.
• Spreadsheet — one sheet per table. Opens in Numbers or Excel.
• Markdown — headings and pipe tables kept.
• Rich Text — formatted text for Pages, Word or TextEdit.
• CSV — the first table, comma separated.
• Text File — just the words.
• Image (JPEG) — the page as a picture, markup included, one file per page.

A format that cannot work for the page you are on is shown grayed out with the reason, rather than letting you tap it and fail. After the file is written, the normal iOS share sheet opens — AirDrop, Messages, Mail, WhatsApp, Signal, Files, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and anything else you have installed.

PDF passwords and file size

Under the PDF row there is a PDF options disclosure with two settings. Password encrypts the file so it cannot be opened without it. Smaller file compresses the page images — useful for email, at some cost to fine print.

Write the password down. It is used once and stored nowhere, which means nobody can recover it, including us. That is the point of it, and it is also the way to lose a document permanently.

Asking about a page

The Ask tab answers questions about the document in front of you — what the total was, what the dates are, what you need to act on. It answers from that page only and says so when the answer is not there.

It needs Apple Intelligence, which means a recent device with the feature switched on in Settings. Without it the tab explains that in a sentence and the rest of the app is unaffected — nothing else in Norvela Scanner depends on it.

Finding a scan later

The search field at the top of Documents searches the words inside your scans, not just their names. So does the iOS Spotlight search from your Home Screen — a scan will turn up there by something printed on it, which is usually how you remember a document a year later.

Your scans on another device

If you are signed in to iCloud, the library lives in your iCloud Drive in a folder called Norvela Scanner. Install the app on an iPad or a new iPhone signed in to the same Apple Account and your documents are there. Nothing to export, nothing to restore, and no account to make.

If they do not appear: check Settings › your name › iCloud that iCloud Drive is on and that Norvela Scanner is allowed to use it, then give the first sync a minute on Wi‑Fi. A device with iCloud off keeps its library locally — that is supported, not broken, but the two devices will not see each other's scans.

Deleting the app does not delete that folder. That is deliberate: uninstalling should not destroy the only copy of a receipt. Remove it in the Files app if you want it gone.

Siri and Shortcuts

Two actions are available to Siri, the Shortcuts app, the Action Button and Control Center: New Scan and Find Scans. "Scan a page with Norvela Scanner" opens straight into the camera, which is a good thing to put on a button when your hands are full of paper.

Accessibility

Every control has a VoiceOver label, every tappable thing is at least 44 points, text scales to the largest accessibility size, and Reduce Motion is honored throughout — with it on, screens change immediately rather than animating.

The color palette is checked against WCAG contrast ratios automatically, in both the standard and increased-contrast appearances. If something is hard to read, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it.

Troubleshooting

The camera will not open. Check Settings → Norvela Scanner → Camera. If it is off, the app says so and offers the import path instead.

No text came off the page. Usually light or focus. Try again with more even light, or with the page flatter. Handwriting is much harder than print, and the app does not promise it.

The text is right but the layout is wrong. Export as Word rather than plain text — headings, lists and tables survive there. If the paragraphs are broken up, try Read this page again after switching the filter to Color.

Spreadsheet is grayed out. No table was found. Ruled tables are recognized much more reliably than columns separated by spaces.

The B&W filter looks wrong. It is an adaptive threshold tuned for paper; on a photograph or a colored chart, use Color or Gray instead.

An export will not write. Almost always storage. Free some space and try again — the app will say if that was the problem.

I deleted something by accident. Look in Trash, inside the app. Nothing leaves it until you empty it.

Free scans and Scanner Unlimited

Five new scans a month are free. A scan is one trip to the camera, or one import, however many pages it has. Adding pages to a document you already have does not count, and the count starts again on the 1st of each month.

Scanner Unlimited removes the count. It is a yearly subscription that renews automatically until you cancel. Nothing is ever locked either way: every document you have made opens, edits, signs and exports whether you subscribe or not, and a scan you have started always saves.

In the app, Settings shows how many free scans are left this month and has Get Scanner Unlimited, Redeem Code, Restore Purchases and Manage Subscription. To cancel, use Manage Subscription, or Settings → your name → Subscriptions on the device. Refunds are handled by Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com.

What the app does not do

Said plainly, so nothing here is a surprise:

• No account, and no service to sign up for.
• Syncing is your iCloud, not ours. If you are signed in to iCloud the library is kept in your own iCloud Drive, under Norvela Scanner, so a new phone or an iPad finds it. Turn iCloud off for the app and everything stays on the device and still works. Details are in the privacy policy.
• No handwriting promise. Neat printing often works. Cursive usually does not, and we would rather say so than have you find out.
• No reading data off a chart. A chart is captured as a picture, and any text on it is read; the numbers behind the bars are not extracted.
• No fax, no OCR credits, no watermark, no upsell.

Contact and bug reports

support@norvela.app. For a bug, the three things that help most are: what you did, what you expected, and what happened instead — plus your device model and iOS version.

If the problem is with a particular page, a photograph of your screen is worth more than a description. Please do not send us the document itself unless you are happy for us to see it; we do not need it to fix most things.

Norvela LLC, United States. See also the Norvela Scanner privacy policy.