Did you know that you can scan paper documents into the Notes app on your iPhone and iPad? The app turns them into PDFs, and trims them to make them look as if you scanned them in a proper scanner. Maybe you read our how-to article on scanning into the Notes app, and you already know this. But in iOS 13, things get better: You also can search those scanned documents.

That’s right. You can scan a sheet of paper into Notes, and anything printed on it will become searchable, as if you typed it in yourself. Let’s see how to search scans.

Digital documents and cloud storage have been great for note-takers. The information is available anywhere there’s an internet connection, so there’s no risk of losing your notes or leaving them at home. But when it comes to books, digital capture means either transcribing the page or taking a picture of it. Not so with this futuristic text scanner.

The iPad has become a workhorse in the last few years. Since the introduction of the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, the transition from pen and paper to digital note-taking is more feasible than ever. GoodNotes 4 is one of the best digital note-taking and document-annotation apps available on iOS.

Did you ever snap a photo of a magazine page, or capture a screenshot of text, and wish you could just copy and paste it like any normal text? Maybe it’s a photo of a recipe from a paper book, and you’d like to be able to search for it in future? The good news is that you can easily extract the text from a photo or screenshot, right there on your iPhone.

The even better news is that we’re going to learn how to do it right now.

If you’ve ever had to edit a scanned document, you’ll know how time-consuming and painstaking this can be. And you’ll appreciate how easy the Prizmo 3 scanning app makes the process. Just download this app onto any image capturing device (a smartphone or camera, for instance), then quickly scan and edit any document to your heart’s content. You can currently get Prizmo 3 for just $29.99 through Cult of Mac Deals.

Here’s a confession: I was terrible at math in school. From Algebra 1 on, I just couldn’t keep the various symbols, numbers, and denominators I was faced with straight, and so I flunked pretty much every test.

But I grew up in the 90’s. If I was in high school today, I’d never fail a math test again. I’d use the new iOS app PhotoMath instead, which literally solves math problems like magic.

Picatext is a Mac app that performs OCR on your screenshots. That’s it, but as you’ll see, “that” is pretty damn handy.

Pixter, my favorite text-scanning OCR app for the iPhone, is now available for the iPad. And v2.0 isn’t just now ready (at last) for the retina displays of the iPhone and the iPad, but it sports a whole new iOS7-inspired design which is frankly gorgeous.

A few months back, I spent far too many hours trying to find an app which would scan a page of text and turn into actual, editable text. I found none. Or rather, I found nothing good. There are plenty of OCR (optical character recognition) apps in the store, but they were either inaccurate, or ugly, or (most often) both.

And while Evernote is excellent at letting you search on scanned pages and even your handwritten notes, you don’t get to touch the text itself.

I gave up, and now – as usually happens with my “urgent” research projects, I’ve forgotten why I needed it on the first place. Which is a shame, as Pixter Scanner has been launched,and it is quite excellent – with one huge annoyance, for me at least.

Going paperless is a goal of mine. I’d love to be able to keep all my important documents, like banking paperwork and medical records, all safely and cleanly tucked away into the digital ether. And, while productivity apps are fairly common in the Mac App store, when Apple made document-organizing app, doo, an Editor’s Choice app this week, well, it certainly piqued my interest.