Taking handwritten notes on digital devices

Posted by Dave M
Jun 1, 2020 at 03:29 PM

My experiences completely match Dr Andlus’ (that writing works my brain differently than merely typing, and differently again from voice recognition, where I second guess what any audience unseen or seen is making of my words and what a clown I am to be dictating them out loud)

On iOS, I’ve found a couple of other interesting apps, which work as keyboard (and can be undocked to provide a floating, movable ‘handwriting keyboard’ panel to write in).

One is Mazec, which I’ve found very good, and has been around a few years. ‘Handwriting’ is another, which I’ve not dabbled with so much.

Notability allows you to select hand-written text on the page, and convert to text. I’ve found this quite effective, even detecting and handling non-latin writing systems.

The difference between the two approaches is that Notability lets you write anywhere on the page, whereas the ‘keyboards’ limit you to a set window.

There are two wild alternatives:

One is ‘pen to print’, which claims it can take a photograph of handwritten text, and convert it to typed text. I dabbled with this a little then realised my paper-based scrawl was a little challenging, as I’d end up writing at multiple angles around a page, not really helping it much.

The other is to go grab an Apple Newton Messagepad 2100. Still the best implementation of handwriting on screen I’ve ever used, and there is still a 3rd party tool around which allows you to connect to your Newton to pull text and notes from it - though in this day and age, there are certain hoops to crash through to get it up on your network and visible, and you’ll forever have set of 4 AA batteries on charge (doubly so if you have a rabbit - they love the mains cables)