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Awhile ago someone asked how a product like ABBYY Finereader, which does great when OCRing typed text, does on handwriting. Not well at all I'm afraid:

https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/50dcb5a8f4230e7a8a40bfe2d0...

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Evernote doesn't just OCR handwriting to a single text; it indexes a bunch of possibilities for every handwritten word. This way the search functionality can search through all these variations, not just the most likely one.

I haven't used its handwriting OCR feature so genuinely curious. Does it not show a single piece of text? If not, what value does the OCR handwriting provide? Is it solely for the search feature?

Yep it seems to be, it indexes every possibility that the handwriting might be so that if you search for it then it comes up. You can see this if you dig through the XML it exports.

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