A return to hand-written notes by learning to read and write

[imoverclocked]

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.

[cptcobalt]

This is a nifty idea. I bet there'll be a HN-correlated pop in fridge whiteboard sales from this.

[LoveMortuus]

Here's a suggestion if you want to avoid markers and such: LCD drawing tablets, I'm talking about the ones that look and function similarly to Etch and Sketch, but it uses a stylus and an LCD display, you can get these for less than 10€.

[abdullahkhalids]

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.

[znpy]

> 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.

[Propelloni]

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 (One other was to always copy books from back to front; very useful but somewhat outdated now.)

[egypturnash]

Or you could just find some lettering manuals and improve your handwriting. Practicing at a slow speed will improve your fast work, too.

[sitkack]

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.

[rnewme]

Why not simply have a laser projector, keyboard and canvas textbox then?

[currymj]

apple notes on new iPadOS does this right now -- just cleans up your handwriting to be slightly neater but still look like you.

[Wowfunhappy]

Wouldn't it make even more sense to replace your quick bad handwriting with perfect Helvetica?

[thimabi]

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 I’m currently struggling with after many years of too much typing and not as much handwriting.

Google’s actual research does help people like me, by making our notes less awful digitally. But I’d love not to be dependent on tech innovations to make my handwriting better.

[al_borland]

If you’re serious about this, I’ve 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.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

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 €20-ish Pilot Metro with medium nib or similar is more than enough.

[moron4hire]

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.

[fatbird]

I noticed my handwriting was terrible, and consciously improved it by writing slower and being more mindful of writing neatly. A fountain pen helped me slow down, but fundamentally it was just a matter of slowing down and consciously forming nicer characters until it became easy to do so, at which point my speed increased--but I retained the habit of paying enough attention to make nice characters.

Deliberate practice (as in worksheets or exercises) is less important than just going as slow as you need to, to make the characters correctly, until your muscle memory builds up and brings back the speed.

[WillAdams]

I suggested Kate Gladstone's Handwriting Repair site elsethread:

https://handwritingrepair.info/

or see:

https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books

or John Howard Benson's lovely _The First Writing Book: Arrighi's Operina_ or Carolyn Knudsen's lovely _An Italic Calligraphy Handbook_ (which is much better than the modest title implies) and get a chisel edge marker or fountain pen.

[emporas]

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.

[0x38B]

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 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..., “ Using different Page Segmentation Modes”

[jahewson]

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!

[WhatsName]

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.

[thimabi]

I don’t know if they are the state-of-the-art, but handwriting recognition in iOS and ChatGPT do wonders for me — even with an ugly handwriting. Though these are more like 90% to 95% accurate, you should review the output before trusting it.

[scrivanodev]

Very interesting experiment. I've been working on a handwriting application [0] for the past couple of years and incorporating the ability to take a picture to convert it into digital ink would be really nice.

[0] https://scrivanolabs.github.io

[aiisahik]

Can it read the scribble of my doctor? If so this is groundbreaking in the medical data entry space.

[bobnamob]

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.

[brainzap]

It was a scary moment when Apple Notes corrected my writing in my own hand writing.

[pjmlp]

I still look forward to have programming environments on tablets that are able to use pen input, instead of forcing us to carry a bluetooth keyboard.

Apparently not something that anyone cares as business opportunity, because most likely most folks wouldn't pay for it, sadly.

[another-dave]

I'm definitely faster at typing than writing though — especially so when it comes to something like code that often requires in-place editing, shuffling statements around etc.

I do like to work with paper & pen but moreso for ideation, diagramming, or todo lists rather than more "structured" inputs.

[Vampiero]

Man that would be horrible UX, I wouldn't pay for that. I'd only use it if someone paid ME to do it

[tomjen3]

Can you touch draw 120 WPM?

[vintermann]

A model that could turn "offline" handwriting (the ink on the page) into "online" (order and timing of the strokes) I think could be really useful for a historical HTR pipeline... but ultimately, we need end to end.

Why is historical HTR so neglected in all multi-task model evaluation benchmarks? There are millions of un-indexed handwritten historical documents which could give us a so much better understanding of our recent past. For that matter, it could give models much better understanding of our recent past.

[albert_e]

Can we replace / augment the keyboard with a white (or marked) paper to write on ... that is in view of a camera that has real time OCR

Feels like it will be a good addition to input devices

[henning]

Can this be used to create deepfake forged signatures/handwriting?

[101008]

That was my initial thought too. For some important authors, there are a few high quality scans of their manuscripts, so with a tool like this you could create fake manuscripts -- and in a few years, after they are dead, say that you find them, create provenance, and boom, unpublished novel by JK Rowl- any author.

[Legend2440]

No. It is not designed to be used as a generative model.

But other people have created handwriting generation models.

[Pamar]

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...

[honeybadger1]

i still write notes daily and already this year have finished 4 notebooks...however, things i need to review are typed, i write to keep things in my mind as they are being discussed...example, if i encountered an error while reviewing a program execution i would write it down "encountered error during attempt to do x" but i would also type it in my notes in vastly more detail with screenshots and other points...handwriting to me is almost like tagging it in my mind so i just don't forget that it happened.

[fredgrott]

Its not the writing PART!

It is the non automation part!

The experiment you can do to verify my point:

1. Write code by hand in plain text editor.....

What you notice....programming syntax and knowledge becomes easier to retain and re-learn.

No joke I do this several times a week.

[nxobject]

As a lay reader, it's fascinating to see how much oomph we're getting out of LLMs on non-language-related tasks by figuring out clever encodings/linearizations.

[no-reply]

This is very interesting. I had this idea of imitating human handwriting in my bucket of todos for machine learning models, but never got to it. I guess we aren't far from it.

[poulpy123]

I'm wondering how well it would work with my crappy writing and the fact I write some letters revere from normal

[jheriko]

seems overkill... for a bunch of reasons tbh. I guess the golden sledgehammer is just too tempting.

taking photos of notes is a weird compromise that nobody really wants... we need better tools not better post processing

[anu7df]

I don't think this is a hypothetical use case, at least for me. I like writing on paper with a fountain pen. But would like a digital version of the notes that are searchable. Reasonable ocr exists for conversion to text, but this would may be give slightly more accurate results.

[moatmoat]

such an exciting research project! I can imagine the impact this could have on education, e.g. handwriting notes of teachers in digital copies; or even preserve old documents in their digital counterpart