How To Use Ctrl-F To Search Text In A Printed Document

Information in this 21^st Century is now stored and accessed digitally. Not only is it easier and faster to store and share information like this article, it’s also very much easier to access it. If you have in any way downloaded a particular long research paper that you wouldn’t want to read all the way through it to see if it covers a certain topic, you can easily do that with the Ctrl+F function and search through the text for that particular topic.

Text search is one of the greatest benefits that come with any digital documents, but if by chance you ever have to search an actual physical document i.e. a hard copy document for text, you probably will have to read it through. If the document is in the printed format and not hand written, you can simply use Ctrl – F, it’s a free Android app that enables you to scan the document’s text and also search through it.

Ctrl-F is a free document scanning tool, but it has both text search and OCR functionality built into it there by making it more useful than the other document scanning app.

Now, install the Ctrl-F app and tap on the camera button to capture a photo of the said document you want to search text in. As soon as the photo has been captured, immediately crop out any part of it that is not text using the on-screen outline tool.

Now, select the language the text is in and wait while Ctrl-F reads it. Although, the reading process can take a while. It took about a minute with the small amount of text we tested it with.

As soon as the app is done reading the text, you will see a search button appear at the bottom right. Tap on it and enter the phrase or word you would want to search the text for. The app will start searching for the text live as you type, and will filter the results accordingly. All the words that match will be highlighted in the image where they appear.

CTRL-F works just flawlessly though the image quality is not all that great and it may even lead to the app not being able to identify a word correctly. We carried out a test with the app using the back of a book cover and the scanned image was not really good. We have seen better results from many other image scanning apps. The image to text conversion rate is a bit slow as well. With all that said, the app is still perfectly useful and also a time saver.

Install CTRL- F From Google Play Store