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Taking handwritten notes on digital devices
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Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Apr 4, 2018 at 10:55 PM
GeorgeB wrote:
>I went back to my trusty Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 and the Samsung Notes app.
The S3 is a great device indeed. A bit expensive though. I have a Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet which does the job (but will less style, I admit)
Regarding the built-in Notes app, did you try StylusLabs Write ?
http://www.styluslabs.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWyxTKa2tZ0
Pierre
Posted by GeorgeB
Apr 5, 2018 at 12:23 AM
No, but I’ll give it try. Thank you,
Posted by Hugh
Apr 5, 2018 at 09:31 AM
I suspect that there are a number of pieces of hardware and quite a few pieces of software that will support the use of handwriting. Personally, for hardware I like the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. But my experience of other devices has been limited (the most notable being those produced years ago under the Palm brand).
On the iPad there are of course quite a few applications that will faithfully record and save handwritten notes as graphical images of handwritten notes. Generally, the differences between these applications seem to me to be marginal.
But the real challenge, it appears to me, is to create software that will reliably and accurately convert that handwriting to text. That still seems more difficult to accomplish than to convert voice to text. Actually, Palm used to achieve both speed and accuracy with its own special form of shorthand (which I think was called Graffiti). But learning Graffiti was a potential barrier for users.
Today, the developer MyScript has been in existence a relatively long time and seems to lead the field, with its technology used by other brands even when this is not evident. I think I first bought a MyScript app close to the turn of the millennium. But even MyScript apps do not, it seems to me, match the accuracy of, say, Nuance voice-to-text software (although that itself is not perfect).
In other words, when working on a medium-form or long-form project, if you want to convert handwriting to text, you can get a better result (i.e. a more efficient combination of accuracy and speed) if you write the text out by hand and then use voice-to-text software to convert it to hardcopy, than if you rely on handwriting-to-text. Such is the state of handwriting-to-text technology currently.
Of course, I am certain that the technology will improve. But in my view it is not “ready for primetime” yet.
Posted by Hugh
Apr 5, 2018 at 09:57 AM
GeorgeB wrote:
I worked with the LiveScribe+ pen and paper. It didn’t work for me.
>I went back to my trusty Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 and the Samsung Notes
>app.
I too had a “Livescribe phase”. The process seemed cumbersome. But a bigger problem for me was that to accommodate the electronics and a battery, the pen was just too fat for comfort in the hand.
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 5, 2018 at 11:26 AM
Hugh wrote:
I suspect that there are a number of pieces of hardware and quite a few
>pieces of software that will support the use of handwriting.
Yeah, but it’s one thing to “support handwriting” and another for it to **actually** work on a daily basis for real-life use in a satisfactory way, so one would prefer it over other input methods.
Even the very first iPad supported handwriting, but the latency and the size of the resulting writing made it unusable for taking notes at a meeting for instance.
>Actually, Palm used to achieve both speed and accuracy with its own
>special form of shorthand (which I think was called Graffiti). But
>learning Graffiti was a potential barrier for users.
Graffiti did actually work for me. It was let down by the hardware in the end.