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.


It’s pretty straightforward: You take a picture of the printed text you want to search, and CTRL-F quickly analyzes the text to create a searchable, digital version on your phone. Then you enter your search term and voila, your query is instantly highlighted. The photo of the text will need to be fairly well-lit, in focus, and straight, and it probably won’t be able to read handwriting or weird fonts, but hey, neither can I.

Some fully-featured scanning apps also have built-in OCR (text recognition), but if you don’t really care about saving the document, CTRL-F is a single-purpose solution that will save you from skimming a wall of text. The developers say an iOS version is also in the works.


CTRL-F | Play Store