Quark Scan King: From Photo to Spreadsheet, Step by Step for Beginners

I messed around with Quark's Scan King over the weekend and hit quite a few pitfalls. Originally I wanted to help the elderly at home turn a stack of medical checkup reports into electronic versions, plus turn a medication list into an editable table. I thought it would just be a matter of taking photos with my phone, but it took nearly an hour of back-and-forth before it went smoothly. This post writes down the whole process, including the pitfalls I hit. Following along should save some time.

This tool is picky about the job. It suits people who only occasionally need to turn paper things into electronic versions over the year and don't want to install seven or eight apps on their phone. Scanning, text extraction, table extraction, translation, and looking up rare characters are all in one entry point, and after shooting you can save directly to Quark Drive, all in one path. It is not suitable for batch work processing hundreds of sheets a day. In that scenario, a scanner plus a set of OCR software is still more reliable; no matter how fast phone shooting is, it can't keep up. This time I had about a dozen pages, which was enough.

From installing the app to shooting the first page

Search Quark in the app store, download and install. The first time you open it, a user agreement and privacy policy will pop up; tap agree. The next page for choosing interest preferences can be filled in randomly or skipped, and it won't affect use.

Enter the home page. Quark doesn't look like a traditional browser. There's a search box at the top and various tool entries below. For me, Scan King was in the tools area when scrolling down the home page, with the icon labeled Scan King. If you can't find it, just type "Scan King" into the top search box, and the first result is it. This is where beginners most easily get stuck. Many people think Quark is just a browser and spend ages looking for where scanning is.

Tap into Scan King, and there is a row of modes: Scan Document, Extract Text, Extract Table, ID Scan, Translate. For first use, practice with one sheet of printer paper and choose Extract Text. Point the phone at the paper, try to get all four corners inside the viewfinder, and avoid lighting that is bright on one side and dark on the other. Quark will automatically frame the paper edges, and if the frame is crooked you can drag the four corners with your finger to fine-tune. After pressing the shutter, it will automatically do perspective correction and straighten the paper shot at an angle. The result page first gives you a processed image, with an Extract Text button at the bottom. Tap it, wait a few seconds, and the recognized text will be listed separately. You can select all and copy, or export. If you want a table, go back one step and choose Extract Table; it will try to restore the row and column structure, and after export it can go directly into Excel.

The pitfalls are basically all in these steps

What you most easily hit is shooting at an angle or having shadows. The first time I shot, my hand shook, the paper was tilted, and half the page had a shadow on it. The recognition turned "triglycerides" into some other word. The solution is to reshoot, put the phone flat, and don't block the light with your hand. If you really can't reshoot, use cropping on the result page to straighten the border, then apply an Enhance or Black and White filter. Once contrast goes up, recognition improves quite a bit. Don't be lazy at this step. At first I wanted to save effort and just copy directly, but fixing wrong characters took more time than reshooting.

Another one is tables with many merged cells. In my medication list, one of the three columns was a cross-row note, and after export that column was completely misaligned. This isn't just Quark's problem; mobile table recognition basically behaves this way when it hits merged cells. My approach was to first shoot the table straight and as un-tilted as possible, then manually fill in those rows on the computer. So don't expect complex financial reports to be perfect in one go.

The thing most people ask is whether it actually charges. For my dozen or so pages of extraction and export, I didn't run into pop-ups, but features like batch processing and high-definition export are where every company leaves a paid opening. Before using it, pay attention to that line of small text on the page. The free version is usable, but don't assume everything can be used for free.

There's also handwriting. Printed text tested fine for me, but I can't guarantee handwriting. Connected strokes are very easy to misrecognize, especially with characters written by elderly people. I suggest not forcing handwritten things through it. If you can retype, retype.

Scanned PDFs can be thrown into Quark Drive. Some articles have compared the free quotas of mainstream cloud drives, and most fall in the 50 to 200GB range. Quark Drive maintains 1TB of free space for new users. According to their claim, that's enough to store about 200,000 high-definition photos or 500 hours of 1080P video. Store them by folder, and you can browse on both phone and computer, which is easier than flipping through screenshots in the album. One step further, you can try Quark's AI sidebar and let it watch and answer while you browse web pages. I'm still figuring this one out, and I'll write about it once I have some insights.