Many of us store images and PDFs in Dropbox that contain text. The company has announced that they will be automatically applying OCR to make them easier to find.

Android: Wouldn't it be great if searching the page of a book in the real world were as easy as hitting Ctrl-F on your keyboard to find a search term instantly? Now you can, with the help of your smartphone's camera and CTRL-F.

Android: When we last asked what your favourite tool was for scanning documents, Lifehacker readers went with ABBY FineScanner by a narrow margin. Now, it's finally available on Android.

Chrome: If you're a regular Google Keep user, you might have missed a (relatively) new feature in the app. If you paste an image into a note, Google lets you convert the image into editable text.

Fonts have long provide a way to present text without having to worry about differing resolutions and point sizes, but on the web you'll still come across the odd piece of text that, for one reason or another, is displayed in raster, rather than vector form. Interacting with said content just became much easier, thanks to Project Naptha.

Android: Google has updated its Drive mobile app with a cleaner, cards-style look and several awesome new features. Among them: the ability to download a copy of documents directly to your device and scan papers using OCR.

iPad 2 only: OfficeDrop, makers of the previously mentioned ScanDrop for Mac, unveiled a new free iPad app this morning that allows you to use your iPad 2's camera to scan documents, run character recognition on them, and upload them to OfficeDrop.

There are quite a few choices on iTunes for apps that can turn images of documents, book pages, business cards and more into digital, editable text. Our favourite is TextGrabber for its ease of use, accuracy and reasonable price.

A potentially handy feature of Google Docs is its option to perform optical character recognition (OCR). As we've suggested in the past, that offers a convenient and free way to convert scanned images into text. But just how accurate is it?

Working with text on your computer offers a range of possibilities in searching and editing that simply aren't available with hard copy text. Check out these five text recognition tools to get your printed text into your computer.

We know of one or two sites (or many more, actually) that provide file conversions between PDFs, Word documents, and a few other files. CometDocs takes the all-in-one approach, supporting more than 50 file types.