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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, I would have thought that OCR on handwriting on a tablet would be great, because they can capture each individual stroke, rather than just the final pixelated product. In other words, because you're witnessing it being written, there's a lot more information. In fact I wouldn't even call it OCR because it's not "optical", but rather "stroke" -- SCR?

Is that something that exists? Is that what the tablet tries to do and fails? Or is it only trying to OCR after-the-fact, in which case I'm not surprised it's terrible.

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there is no OCR on device fullstop, which in itself would be fine if it happened async in the background.

You can use the OCR feature only in the companion desktop app, explicitly selecting pages you want to run the process on. The result is better than it used to be but still not great and, importantly, it does NOT seem they make any difference if you later on do a search on the device

This is the biggest issue for me as well. Seems that the OCR has to be triggered manually, for each page of each notebook. Which of course I don't remember to do and now there are too many.

The search doesn't appear to search across notebooks either.

The experience that I would want (expect) is that OCR happens in the background, all the time, no need to trigger and that I can then search for a word/string and find all the notes on that topic.

I've fallen back to tags and dates in filenames to have any chance of tracking down old meeting notes.

Well, you can do OCR while using the device but... it's not on device. The device has to be connected to the Internet for OCR to work. I've never checked where does it connect to do it, as I never use it...

but the result is not subsequently used for full text indexing and searching (on device or on desktop) therefore it's useless

Yep, totally.

Apple newton did it. They required you to stroke your letters in a pedantically correct way because it used the stroke path, not the end pixel appearance, to detect letters.

I genuinely liked the Palm Graffiti. It took a couple of days of playing Giraffe to get used to it, but afterwards the speed and precision was quite decent. Of course it's nothing compared to modern swipe keyboards but still.

Agreed, I often miss Palm's Graffiti input, I don't remember it well at all at this point I think I tried a similar input on android and went back to gesture keyboard. Of course, I kind of miss even developing for Palm as well, which was far simpler an experience than what Android and iOS are today.

Then again, rose colored glasses and all.

That got a lot better w/ v2 of Rosetta (also known as Calligrapher).

Recognition for me was about perfect, and I took notes on my Newton MessagePad using a 3rd party outliner in almost all of my college classes (art history was the exception --- used the main Newton app for that, along w/ little sketches and reference folios to the text which I then faxed to the fax machine in the Art Department's office for a student who had a learning disability which prevented his taking notes --- turns out that he then shared them with everyone in the dorms, which I found out about after the course was over when the professor noted how much better everyone's grades were that year and how she had found out when asking other students.

So did palmOS "Graffiti" input. It was fun!

I had a Sony-Erickson phone with a resistive touch screen and full keyboard and a stylus. Very futuristic for the aughts! They also forced writing letters in a very specific way, in order to trigger OCR.

In research this is called Online Handwriting Recognition

reMarkable does Online Handwriting Recognition with MyScript running in the cloud, not on the tablet https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2

In the old Palm Pilot days the way the OCR worked is you had to do the strokes in a special software approved manner, your natural stroke motion wasn't acceptable, you were expected to learn to write in a special shorthand system called Graffiti.

I'd imagine going by stroke order would be a bit tricky since a lot of people don't write the way their teachers taught them to write. (Think anybody with bad handwriting).

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