Will it surprise you to learn that the fax machine is still a necessary part of life for many people? We may be living in a state-of-the-art era, but industries from medicine to mortgage brokers still rely on this 1980s technology to run their businesses and their lives. Fortunately, you don’t need to have a big fax machine with a dedicated phone line – we’ll show you how to send faxes from iPad.
Unless you’ve recently had to buy a home or deal with a law firm or government, you may not know that fax as a means of sharing paperwork is alive and well. It’s often easiest for most non-technical customers to share important documents like contracts and invoices.
This is helped by the fact that many of these businesses are notoriously conservative and therefore reluctant to adopt new technologies. Fax rates are even higher in developing countries and Japan, so if you have to deal with companies in those countries, you may unexpectedly find yourself needing to fax there as well.
Fortunately, sending faxes from your iPad is actually pretty easy. There are a number of apps in the App Store that can take care of this service for you – what usually happens is that you send a digital copy of your fax – for example scanning or taking a photo – to the app developer – and they run or hand over a computer that connects to old-fashioned phone lines. Even if your documents start life on your iPad, they can easily be sent to an old-fashioned beep-beep-beep fax machine on the other end.
There are a few things to consider when looking for the best app for faxing on iPad. First, you’ll want to make sure the application supports taking a picture of the document you want to fax; this is what some apps call “scanning” documents. It should automatically recognize documents and even receipts and fix them for you. – usually by detecting the corners of a page and determining where the straight lines are.
When you find an application that manages to deliver good looking documents, take a look at the cost of sending a fax. This is where many fax apps tend to fall. If you want to send a lot of faxes each week, you’ll want to find a service that works on a subscription basis rather than per fax or per page. But most people don’t fax that often; these people will want to find apps that charge a fee for every fax sent, without paying another monthly fee. Many apps in this group charge a flat fee per page (usually up to $0.99 for each page posted!), while the best charge periodically based on how many pages you need to submit.
We looked at a number of options in the iOS App Store and our top pick for faxing from an iPad is Readdle’s (iTunes Link). It consistently delivers great results even in mediocre light, and an app purchase lets you scan and fax documents from both your iPad and iPhone. You can shoot a distorted color image with low contrast, and the app offers an easy-to-read black and white scan perfect for sending to a fax machine. It is the best option when you need to sign a paper document and fax it to an asset.
Scanner Pro was able to “scan” a pretty good copy of this crumpled Star Wars ticket, even in low light.
But the best part has to do with Scanner Pro’s fax price structure. Instead of being charged monthly or per page, you are charged by the number of pages you need to fax. There are three prices: Fax Unit pack 1, Fax Unit pack 2, and Fax Unit pack 5. Faxes up to three pages per pack 1, faxes 4 through 7 pages 2, which are 99 cents, $1.99, and $4.99 respectively. . and faxes over 7 pages fit in package 5. If you are sending faxes from the USA to the USA. But in the US, you can fit up to 7 pages in a 99-cent package 1-in-1.
While Scanner Pro itself isn’t free, the app costs a single purchase and comes with quick updates for new iOS versions or new iPads. It costs $6.99 most of the time, but you can grab it for just 99 cents for now.
To send a fax, all you have to do is take a picture with the app or open a previously saved document once in the Scanner Pro app (it supports cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive and others, and nicely with the integrated iOS Photos app) and tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen. You will see a list of options – one of them will be to fax your document.
If you tap on fax, you have the option to fill in the country of destination, the fax number you sent the document to, the names of the recipient and sender, as well as the option to add a cover page. Fill this out and then press the button, Scanner Pro will determine how many pages your fax is and confirm how much it will cost – from there you can enter your iTunes password or use Touch ID and puff! Your fax is uploaded and sent.
Sometimes, however, you may need to sign a document and email it back (if you need to email a hard copy, you can sign it with a pen and upload it to Scanner Pro – just like faxing it in the last section). readdle (iTunes Link) will help you. The biggest reason we stick with PDF Expert 5 is Readdle’s constant updates and support – while many signing apps still don’t support the iPad Pro, PDF Expert 5 (and Scanner Pro) already does and manages to look great. This means that if you use an Apple Pencil with the iPad Pro, you’ll probably want to use it instead of your finger to do the editing and signing.
Another reason we love PDF Expert 5 over other options is its affordability. Many document signing apps will charge per signed document which seems like an absurd cost or impose monthly or annual fees or are full of ads. PDF Expert 5 has a single cost to purchase the app, then all the features are unlocked – in addition to signing, the app supports any number of PDF formatting tools and you can store multiple signatures, which is handy for peers or executive assistants. .
To sign a document with PDF Expert 5, you must first open it in the app. You can tap a PDF in your email and open it in PDF Expert 5, or browse to your favorite cloud storage service from within the app to find the document you want. After opening the document in the app, tap an icon that looks like a fountain pen in the left navigation bar. This will open the signature dialog – if you haven’t saved a signature before, you can do so from this menu. Once you have a signature stored in the app, you can press and hold where you want to sign on your document, tap signatures, then ‘My Signature’ – the app will drop your signature where you first tapped, but you can move it. Take it wherever you need it on the page.
Currently, PDF Expert 5 alone will cost $4.99, but Readdle has a Productivity Pack in the iOS App Store – you can: Scanner Pro, PDF Expert 5 and Printer Pro just $5.99 for all three.