Landlords, accountants, insurers and HR departments all ask for the same thing: send us a PDF. What you have is eleven photographs on your phone. The conversion itself takes seconds — the difference between a document that looks considered and one that looks slapdash is what you do before and during it.
Take better source photographs
Every flaw in the photograph is preserved in the PDF, and most of them come from the same three causes. Shoot in even light rather than under a single lamp, which throws a hard shadow across half the page. Hold the camera parallel to the paper rather than at an angle, so the edges stay rectangular. And fill the frame with the document, because cropping later throws away resolution you cannot get back.
Most phones now have a document mode in the camera or notes app that flattens perspective and boosts contrast automatically. If yours does, the output is considerably better than a plain photograph and takes no longer.
Page size: the setting that matters most
If the PDF will be printed or filed alongside other documents, choose A4 or US Letter so the pages match everything else. Your photograph is placed on a standard page, centred, with whatever margin you choose.
If it will only be read on a screen, fitting the page to the image is usually better. It avoids the white bands you get when a wide photograph sits on a portrait page, and there is no printer to satisfy.
Mixing portrait and landscape photographs in one document is where auto orientation earns its place: each page takes the shape of the image on it instead of forcing everything into one orientation.
Why a small margin is worth it
Printers cannot print to the very edge of a sheet, and a document with content running right to the boundary loses a few millimetres all round. A small margin costs nothing on screen and prevents a clipped edge on paper. It also stops the page looking cramped.
The thing a photo PDF cannot do
The words in it are not text. They are pixels arranged to look like text, which means nobody can search the document, copy an address out of it, or have it read aloud. For a receipt that is entirely fine. For a contract someone needs to quote from, it is a real limitation, and making it searchable requires optical character recognition — a different process entirely.
It is worth knowing which of the two you are producing, because the person receiving it will find out either way.
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