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The scan workspace

How the workspace thinks, what the toolbar does, and how a scan session flows.

One workspace, one job

PDFScanner Neo opens straight into its scan workspace — there is no document browser and no library. The workspace holds exactly one document in progress: the pages you scan, open or import. When the document is done, you save a finished PDF copy to a folder of your choice and clear the workspace for the next job.

Because of this model, Save never means “store in the app.” It always means “export a finished PDF copy to a destination.” The workspace keeps its pages after a save, so you can save again with different settings or keep working.

The toolbar

Scan: Starts a scan with the selected device and settings. The button stays prominent even while a document is open, because scanning more pages into the same document is a core flow (adding to a non-empty document requires ProPro).
Open Pro: Replaces the workspace with an existing PDF or image file (PDF, PNG, JPEG, HEIC) so you can edit and re-export it. PDFs handed to Neo by the Files app or other apps arrive the same way. Password-protected PDFs prompt for their password; it is used once and never stored.
Import Pro: Appends pages from one or more PDFs or images to the current document. Only shown while the workspace has pages.
Save: Opens the save menu: Select Folder, your Quick Save presets, Smart Save and Share…. See Saving and exporting.
Edit: Page clipboard and layout actions: Cut, Copy, Paste, Duplicate, Delete Page, Crop, rotation, Fake Duplex Reordering.
Actions: Page processing: OCRPro, DeskewPro, Manual DeskewPro, Convert to Black and White, Rasterize, Remove Blank Pages, Revert to Scanned Original.
Open Previous: The clock icon restores your previous session — see recovery below.
Settings: The gear icon opens app settings: save behavior, scan behavior, save presets and your Pro subscription.

NoteExact placement adapts to your screen. On iPhone, some actions move into the More overflow menu.

Pages and thumbnails

Scanned pages appear as thumbnails — in a strip along the bottom on iPhone, and in a sidebar on iPad. From the thumbnails you can:

Tap a page to open it in the main view.
Drag a thumbnail to reorder pages.
Swipe a thumbnail (Mail-style) to delete a page.
Long-press to start multi-page selection.

While Neo processes pages in the background — deskew, OCR, color conversion — affected thumbnails show a small processing badge. You can keep working; the badge disappears when the page is done.

Viewing pages

Swipe left and right in the main view to move between pages. The view menu offers Zoom In, Zoom Out, Zoom to Fit and Actual Size; on iPhone and iPad you can also pinch to zoom.

Undo

The most recent action can be undone. For processing gone wrong, Revert to Scanned Original restores pages to exactly what the scanner delivered — see Cleaning up pages.

Recovery: Open Previous

Neo deliberately starts with an empty workspace after a relaunch — a fresh scan session should never inherit yesterday’s half-finished document by surprise. Your previous session is not lost, though:

Tap the clock icon (Open Previous) in the toolbar.
Neo restores the previous workspace — document, current page, zoom and scroll position.

Clearing the workspace

Discard All: Removes all pages and returns to the empty scan panel.
Discard Exported: After a save, removes exactly the pages that were exported — handy when you scan several documents in one batch and save them piece by piece.