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Gimp is pretty good. Just take Colors / Auto / White Balance and it nearly always does a very good job.
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I set the camera on a tripod and use long exposure times. I've succeeded in 'scanning' even nearly unreadable papers using this method. This works even in a dark room, given the exposure times are long enough, and the sensor in your camera is powerful enough.
I use a DSLR though, but I presume that even a point-and-shoot camera should be able to produce good results.
PS: You'll need to do some post processing. But it will be simple enough, and you could get it done with something like Picasa or Paint .NET.
"Real men drive manual transmission" - Rajesh.
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You could iron the page if it is badly creased. Or get some of that non-reflective glass/plastic that picture framing shops are always trying to sell.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier just to use a scanner? I mean printers with scanners are so cheap these days that they are almost disposable.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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Could you just take it to a Kinkos or some such and ask for the document to be scanned. It'd probably be pretty cheap.
I think you'll get a more professional result out of something like that than doing all this work to use your camera.
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I've never had much luck with that, Brady. Glare, color shifts, keystoning, or some other damned thing always interferes. The best I've managed so far happened yesterday, when I needed to get a signed document on company letterhead to a government agency in a hurry. The scanner isn't working, the document is in Word format, and the fax machine is too poor quality to serve. So I signed the printed document, photographed my signature with my phone, emailed the picture to myself, cropped, resized, rotated and color-corrected the image on my desktop, then pasted it into the Word document. It looked as good as the original, so I pdf'd it and emailed it off, and no one has questioned its validity. 
I do plan to keep my signature file locked in my safe, on a thumb drive, and no images of it on my desktop. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Set the white balance on the camera. I'm shocked at how few people actually do this, or do it in editing.
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Until today I couldn't figure where to set the white balance. It's greyed out in the normal settings, and you have to go into 'deep settings'.
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It's typically a very manual feature on most new cameras. I've pulled off some great shots using it. My professional photographer friend showed me that he carried around a white sheet of paper in his pocket. When in strange or bad lighting, he would whip it out at arm's length to set the white balance, then get his picture.
I didn't mean it in a mean way, I'm just surprised at the amount of people that discuss the same issue on all sorts of forums, and rarely do people ever mention this feature.
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My biggest problem is paralax. I can't seem to get the picture parallel to the document. It always looks skewed; now that is going to take a tripod, which will only happen after payday, or just lots of practice, and a trip to the local print shop for the currently needed scan. It's still interesting though and I will continue as a little hobby.
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