Confession time. This week’s Ask Lifehacker is a bit of a head-scratcher, because the wide world of PDFs is confusing, at best, and typically more frustrating than anything else. There are a ton of different apps you can find that let you open, edit, and mess around with PDFs. Some of them are free and meh, a few of them are free and awesome, and most cost anything from a mild to an outrageous amount of money.

This week we answer a burning question we have all asked ourselves at some point, 'how do I sort through pdfs?' The answer is simpler than you'd think, all thanks to something called "Optical Character Recognition".

In a perfect world, we’d all have a feature-packed, free PDF editor that can do everything you might need whenever you’re given an important document to fiddle with.

It’s no mystery that Macs leave a lot to be desired when it comes to editing PDFs. Fortunately, PDFpenPro 8 is here to give your Mac a boost. This PDF editing software lets you merge, markup, and even OCR PDFs straight from your Mac.

Android: I hate dealing with PDFs. I understand why they're necessary, but loading them is a pain and editing them is even worse. So, Adobe's news that Acrobat Reader can edit PDFs stored in your Dropbox is a godsend.

Android: It's not exactly difficult to view PDFs in Android -- you can use Google Drive, Google's new standalone viewer, or countless other apps. But if you're a Dropbox user and regularly work with PDF files, the addition of a native PDF viewer in the latest version could be helpful.

Android: PDF viewers are a bit like parachutes: if you discover you don't have one right when you need it, you're immediately having a bad day. To help, Google has released a standalone PDF reader.

Chrome: Notable PDF is a Chrome extension lets you edit PDF files from within the Chrome browser. This extension works offline, too, so it's a great add-on for Chromebooks.

If you've ever tried to send a large PDF over email, you know that email systems often have file size limits. SmallPDF will combine and shrink PDFs from the cloud so you can send bigger files.

iPad: The export feature in Office for iPad is buried away and only lets you export a PDF as an email attachment. That means you can't save it locally anywhere (or in the cloud). Macworld figured out a way around this using If This Then That.

Gmail used to have a handy "Save as Google Document" feature in Gmail that made it easy to archive emails, but that option isn't there anymore. Digital Inspiration suggests using the Print option to save it as a PDF instead.

Having a built-in PDF viewer in Chrome is useful for short documents, but Chrome's insistence on using it even when you download a larger file and open it can be a nuisance. If you want the option of opening in a desktop viewer instead, here's how to disable it.

Android: In the future, paper (much like running) will only exist for recreation, for fun. In the meantime, we still have to deal with annoying contracts, memos and receipts. All of which can be scanned instantly and uploaded directly to Dropbox, Evernote and more with Scanbot, previously available for iOS but now on Android as well.

Web: You can automate your Dropbox with Wappwolf, including converting PDF files to TXT, but if you need your PDFs as Doc files to open in MS Word or other word processors, Convertii is the way to go.

While you can get great PDF editors for your Windows PC or Mac , sometimes you just want to combine and convert documents quickly. In those cases, toPDF can do the trick.

PDFs are by no mean tough to make these days, but you might not always have access to the software you need to turn something into a PDF. For those moments, PDF Convert is a service that will turn your emails into a PDF in a matter of minutes.

Windows: PDF conversion tools are plentiful these days, but Debenu has managed to stand out from the crowd by integrating neatly into the Windows Explorer right-click menu. With a simple right-click, you can open up a lot of PDF conversion possibilities.

We're unashamed fans of PowerShell around these parts, and here's another handy application for it: changing the way PDF files open from SharePoint document libraries that use Office Web Apps.

Dear Lifehacker, My company has work-from-home employees, directors and contractors spread throughout Australia. When we have a document that requires multiple signatures, I ask each person to sign, scan and email their own copy back to me. Common sense would suggest that the collection of each of these individually signed (but otherwise identical) documents equals one fully signed document. But what does the law say about this, if anything? And is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Signing Off