Gravity Forms
+ Document Scanner

Forms often need paper: payslips for a tenancy application, a signed contract, receipts for an expense claim, a doctor’s note. Phone photos of those pages arrive skewed, shadowed and sideways, as separate files. The Gravity Forms Document Scanner add-on brings a scanner into the form: visitors photograph each page with the rear camera (a page frame helps them line it up) or choose photos, and every page is found, cropped and straightened automatically with perspective correction, in A4 or Letter proportions.

Visitors check the four corners and drag any of them, rotate a sideways page and choose colour, grey or black and white. Pages are listed with thumbnails and can be reordered, adjusted, retaken or deleted. On submit the server checks the pages and the max pages and size again and joins them into one PDF stored with the entry, with page thumbnails, merge tags such as {Scan:4:url} and {Scan:4:pages} and an option to attach the PDF to notifications. Problems are always shown to the visitor, never silently dropped.

Unlike our Photo Capture add-on (photos saved as pictures, with an optional document frame), our Document Packet add-on (merges files on the admin side after submission) or the core File Upload field (stores files as they are), Document Scanner captures multi-page paper in the form and delivers it as one clean PDF. Works with multi-page and AJAX forms, Save and Continue and Document Packet. Image work runs in the visitor’s browser and the PDF is made on your own server, with no outside service. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

When a visitor captures or picks a photo, a small script in the browser looks for the page: the photo is turned grey and smoothed, strong edges are found, the area they close in is measured and the largest four-cornered shape is taken as the page, then each side is fine-tuned on a sharper copy. The visitor can drag the corners; the page is then straightened with a perspective transformation onto a rectangle in A4 or Letter proportions, rotated if needed and filtered in colour, grey or black and white, and uploaded to your site as a JPEG under a random token, together with a small thumbnail. The field itself only posts the ordered list of tokens. On submit the server checks every page again (it must exist, belong to this field and be a real JPEG, within the page and size limits) and assembles the pages into one PDF with a bundled PDF library. The PDF and the thumbnails are saved in the form’s Gravity Forms upload folder and the PDF link becomes the field value. Unfinished pages wait in a private folder and are deleted after 30 days. Everything happens in the browser and on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.