Tbh my handwriting is write only. Through decades of computer use it has deteriorated to the point were it is illegible even to myself.
Still. I will always be notetaking (and doodling) during meetings as it helps me order my thoughts.
I learned 10 finger typing when I was 8 in school (42 years ago), and have been glued to computer since then ; if I write something, or even sign something, it is complete gibberish, even to myself. To me it looks like those last stages of dementia scribbling, but I know that's not it because it was like this since I was 12 or so; my teachers couldn't read my writing and it affected my grades.
Iām the same way, and between that and the fact that I can type 120+wpm, makes me angry every time someone expects me to write something. Making dirt smudges on dried tree pulp is as archaic and outmoded as carving marks into bones, and in my view has no place in modern society outside of art.
> in my view has no place in modern society outside of art.
For a lot of use cases I agree, but no place is to ... abrupt in my opinion. Computers for sure have a multiplier affect in many cases. But when you really want to think something trough it's advised to slow down. For those cases paper and pen is the perfect medium.
And I have a personal preference when making notes with pen and paper about hikes and climbs I'm working on/doing. But that's just me
Same. Over 20 years (note taking especially) it is reduced to scribbles. The value of it is the time thinking while writing it mostly, though todo's are longer lived.
If your todo list is, or needs to be long lived, I think you might have more problems :D
I make notes on paper as the act of writing makes it stick about in my head longer than it would if I typed typing them out; though similar to you there's better penmanship from a spider that fell in ink.
I recently purchased a small refrigerator whiteboard and it's been really amazing with the combination of my iPhone's ability to take a picture of my handwriting (script or cursive) and copy/pasta into a text. It's not always perfect (nor is my handwriting!) but it's good enough to just replace a character or two and hit send.
This really tickles a bunch of things for me:
1) I am not sending a whole image (it's efficient)
2) I don't have to type/swipe at all (I'm not looking at a screen)
3) My s/o has easy access to the list at all times (it's not in a cloud)
4) It requires no power to update/maintain (markers last a long time)
5) It just feels so natural to grab a marker and write on the fridge when I exhaust something in that same fridge.
This is very cool. Here is interesting application of something like this. My handwriting is pretty bad, and worse still when writing fast. When I am teaching, a lot of what I write is worse than I would like it to be.
I could teach a system like this my very slow neat handwriting. And then as I write on my whiteboard while teaching, it replaces my quick bad handwriting with the neater handwriting.
Improving your hand writing is not hard. For whiteboards start out with using block letters only. It will slow you down in the beginning but not for long.
That's one of the "game changing" hints I received during my time as a tutor at university. (One other was to always copy books from back to front; very useful but somewhat outdated now.)
If you draw your equations well enough, they can get converted into LaTex in realtime and then you could run them in a computational notebook.
Esp if you fuse the audio of you explaining the equations along with the LaTex it can correct for errors.
What software can do this?
The new Calculator by Apple is supposed to do it (but the result is quite underwhelming)
I think Mathpix API [1] can use used to do something like that in realtime/ish
Or you could just find some lettering manuals and improve your handwriting. Practicing at a slow speed will improve your fast work, too.
> My handwriting is pretty bad
i know it might sound dumb, but have you tried playing with a fountain pen?
The feedback is way different from a ballpoint pen and it also depends on paper and the kind of ink. It makes writing way less "predictable" and a bit more enjoyable.
a cheap one (5-15$) with a medium nib might be a good start... some people move on to collect fountain pens, but i do most on my (on paper) writing with a ~20$ Pelikan Jazz.
I know your comment is in earnest and I don't mean to make fun of you, but there is something so funny in our Americanised world where everything is reduced to "it's not you, you just need to buy the correct gizmo that will solve all your problems."
Fountain pens enthusiasts are like music gear or mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, that justify their hobby and believe spending on the next shiny thing is the key to fulfil their whatever, until the next shiny thing arrives.
The thing is... if one dislikes or doesn't care about writing that they have basically forgotten how to, it is not spending money on a fancy writing implement that is gonna turn them into a medieval monk scribe.
Probably good advice if you are right handed and have good fine motor skills.
At least way into the 90s kids here learned to write with fountain pens. For me this meant pages full of smudges, forked pens and generally unreadable text.
As soon as I was allowed to switch to a regular pen my handwriting improved a lot (still not great, but better).
I've realized that when I use cheap pens on hotel stationery, my handwriting looks terrible, probably because the surfaces are too smooth? Other than fountain pens, are there other alternatives that give more tactile feedback?
Nibs / dip-pens ;-)
It's only half a joke: having to regularly dip the pen in ink, be mindful of how much ink you have, having to swiftly wipe it once in a while to avoid drying ink (& flow issues), forces to slow down & take "micro-breaks".
This benefits the handwriting, but also the quality of the study. And is surprisingly relaxing.
(so called "crow-quill" nibs are relatively cheap, available, carry a fair amount of ink)
IMO felt tip pens feel comparatively rough to gel, and ballpoint pen, etc.
I write a lot with a fountain pen and if anything it made it harder to understand my handwriting... even the next day I'll have a hard time.
I've considered the "just learn to write better" approach and I've tried here and there but I've been handwriting journals for 28 years and I'm just not sure it's possible to write cleanly at the speed I handwrite at this point. Especially since it's in cursive.
I can't imagine anyone writing at their 'fastest' is going to produce something that is broadly legible.
Can it read the scribble of my doctor? If so this is groundbreaking in the medical data entry space.
The number of deaths attributable to misread treatment orders in hospitals is staggering.
I'd be very careful about sticking another layer of interpretation between doctor and treating nurse.
It's unfortunate med school doesn't teach block lettering like they used to teach to draftsmen/women.
Almost no medical school or hospital in the United States use paper or handwriting anymore. All orders are electronic.
Entering this sort of data correctly should be on the doctor. McDonaldās digital order style giant pancake buttons with huge touch targets with wide margins and large type on a huge touchscreen should solve the boomer objections.
Alternately, make it an app for the huge iPad Pro to solve the same problems. Make it as hard to fuck up as a fast food order. Disambiguation of input commands is a solved problem.
There isnāt really the will. Stupid windows apps with standard windows UI dropdowns that confuse and frustrate people not well versed with computer UI, running on standard low contrast small type displays with standard keyboard and mouse input, running on laggy RDP thin clients to underprovisioned workstation VMs in a data center is sadly the industry norm, and it still kills people.
From the title, I naively assumed this article would be about people relearning to make legible/beautiful handwritten notes after losing this ability. That is something Iām currently struggling with after many years of too much typing and not as much handwriting.
Googleās actual research does help people like me, by making our notes less awful digitally. But Iād love not to be dependent on tech innovations to make my handwriting better.
This has been mentioned somewhere else in the comment thread, but if you want to improve your handwriting, a good way is to use a fountain pen.
My handwriting is immensely better with a fountain pen than with ballpoint or gel pens; I suppose partly because the fountain pen forces you to an optimal position and angle (it's much more inflexible about that, you can't just push it against the paper in any angle and expect it to write), and partly because it provides a smoother experience and feedback.
You don't need to go overboard, the typical ā¬20-ish Pilot Metro with medium nib or similar is more than enough.
If youāre serious about this, Iāve stumbled into areas of YouTube with people dedicated to this. Pick a font of how you want your writing to look, and practice, practice, practice. People make available (and sell) special lined sheets to get the height of various things right or help to guide the writer to the perfect slant.
You just have to have the time and interest to do the work, much like you probably did when first learning to write.
How do you recommend that practice to be like? Simply trying over and over to perfect each letterform on empty lined sheets, based on a reference?
Iāve done a few handwriting workbooks, mostly consisting of block letter templates to fill. But each of them is incomplete on its own, and they donāt even share the same font, making it much harder to practice.
Good idea. May you please share youtube link you are referencing?
Also check out the resources on the r/handwriting subreddit.
Study comic lettering. Not saying it's the most efficient way of writing, but the process will teach you to think in terms of strokes and consistency. You can easily develop your own style from there.
Eric Hebborn (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hebborn) wrote "Italico per Italiani" (available in Italian only, alas https://www.amazon.co.uk/Italico-italiani-moderno-trattato-c...) as a textbook/manual to improve day-to-day, practical calligraphy. Maybe there is something similar in other languages too...
I tried to use tesseract for OCR, 10 years ago, it recognized English good enough. tesseract was also developed by Google if I am not mistaken, but open source.
I tried to use it then, for non English language, for Greek, and it was very bad.
Happy to see some good OCR research based on transformers.
Iāve been really impressed with Tesseract - I used it last month to add invisible OCR text (1) to scanned PDFs I reference a lot. My scans are quite good, but I was still impressed with the accuracy.
I also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation setting (2) in the terminal until I got output I could copy & paste to add a navigable table of contents.
1: with the help of https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.h..., ā Using different Page Segmentation Modesā
I OCRed your comment with Tesseract:
``` I've been really impressed with Tesseract - | used it last month to add invisible OCR text (1) to scanned PDFs I reference a lot. My scans are quite good, but | was still impressed with the accuracy.
| also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation setting (2) in the terminal until | got output I could copy & paste to add a navigable table of contents.
1: with the help of https://github.com/ocrmypdfiOCRmyPDE
2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.h..., ā Using different Page Segmentation Modesā ```
This kind of mirrors my earlier experience with Tesseract, if it can't get OCRing a screenshot right, what can it get right? It's not like "I used" is such a rare phrase either, but it replaced the I with a pipe.
>if it can't get OCRing a screenshot right, what can it get right?
Book scans which is what it was designed for.
If you read the fine manual you would see that they suggest the _minimum_ resolution to run it over is an x-height of 20 pixels, screens have seldom have one higher than 10 pixels. With those settings I got the following out of OPs comment:
I've been really impressed with Tesseract - I used it last month to add invisible OCR text (1) to scanned PDFs I reference a lot. My scans
are quite good, but I was still impressed with the accuracy.
I also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation setting (2) in the terminal until I got output I could copy & paste to adda
navigable table of contents.
1: with the help of https://github.com/ocrmypdt/OCRmyPDF
2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.h..., ā Using different Page Segmentation ModesāI OCRed an unprocessed screenshot from the chapter's table of contents (1), which gave me (2). The collated table of contents (3) was error free, but as your example shows, this OCR isn't good enough to not need checking and proof-reading.
1: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/vogue-sewing-11-toc-screens...
2: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/tesseract-ocr-output.png
Tesseract was originally created by HP, open-sourced, and later developed by Google. It's based on techniques from the 1980s and is pretty underwhelming. But at least it's free!
What is currently state-of-the-art when it comes to detetcting handwriting from photos?
Tracing strokes is nice but I would be more interested in converting my handtaken notes to markdown.
I donāt know if they are the state-of-the-art, but handwriting recognition in iOS and ChatGPT do wonders for me ā even with an ugly handwriting. Though these are more like 90% to 95% accurate, you should review the output before trusting it.
I'm looking for something like that, but free/open source and offline. Suggestions welcome!
Its pretty remarkable. I've used my phone to take pictures of stickers with model information that I couldn't otherwise reach and was able to copy the text from it. Really wild stuff.
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