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# How to incorporate handwritten notes into Emacs Orgmode
Bala Ramadurai (his/him, <mailto:bala@balaramadurai.net>)
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Research suggests that note taking is most effective when done by hand. Yes, handwritten notes. Certainly, typewritten or typed out notes are more efficient, however notes written by hand are retained by the human brain much longer.
Integrating handwritten notes into a computer leaned productivity workflow is tricky. Also, in terms of hardware, if all you have is a smartphone, then we need to deal with the situation a bit differently.
This talk will introduce to you a simple system to integrate handwritten notes into your org-mode (Emacs) based productivity workflow.
- Gist of the problem of dealing with handwritten notes
- Advantages of handwritten notes
- Emacs org mode workflow
- Option 1: Hardware for handwriting not available
- Option 2: Hardware for handwriting available
# Discussion
## Notes
- Tesseract is a free and open source tool to do OCR (may or may not
convert handwriting)
- <https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract>
- Karl Voit: I\'m not practicing handwritten OCR at the moment. From
what I\'ve read, offline handwriting OCR (offline OCR = not
recognizing while writing but form a (scanned) document) is only
implemented in a good way in highly proprietary services such as
Microsoft OneNote and Evernote and Apple Notes. Since I don\'t use
those services on purpose
(<https://karl-voit.at/2018/04/21/end-of-OneNote/>), I don\'t have
personal experience. I\'m still hoping that there will be a FOSS
solution one fine day.
- I\'m (rarely) taking notes on my BOOX Note Air e-ink tablet
(which I love). It has decent on-device offline-OCR but it\'s
really tedious to use it. So usually, I keep the notes as PDF
file and don\'t care to OCR it. Not great but at the moment I
can live with it.
- After all: I\'m much faster when typing on my keyboard
(<https://karl-voit.at/2021/03/21/advantage2-plans/>) - so if
there is no graphical information to be captured, I\'m faster
typing in Org mode than writing by hand.
- <https://capture2text.sourceforge.net/> \-- another potential OCR
solution that is FOSS, but supported only on Windows OS
- mathpix seems to support OCR now as well:
- <https://mathpix.com/blog/mathpix-text-ocr>
- <https://mathpix.com/handwriting-recognition>
- Leo Vivier owns an e-ink tablet: Boox Max Lumi (almost A4-size,
bigger brother of Boox Note Air)
- Digital pens and digitizing platforms help to get your notes from
analogue into digital form:
- <https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-smart-pens/>
- Also, livescript uses special pens and tablets (erasable and
correctable), transcribes your handwriting
- [LiveScribe](https://www.amazon.com/Livescribe-Single-Subject-Notebook-4-pack/dp/B001AALJ1I/ref=asc\_df\_B001AALJ1I/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=167151358503&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=14286771041209503377&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9027973&hvtargid=pla-359920653567&psc=1)
## Questions and answers
- Q: How do you link the notes together so that you could search
through them in the future?
- A: From text device or text then into an OCR method then through
Org-Roam. Paper to Jpeg photo from phone to OneNote to Org Mode
system.
- Q: Is it necessary to OCR your handwriting or change the way you
write to use your workflow?
- A: Yes, you have to do this to facilitate indexing and linking.
- Q: What about Searching notes, notes to text while being offline
- A: only proprietary software like Google Keep and Microsoft
OneNote can
- search with OCR, as far as Bala is aware
- Q:Those articles on notetaking seem interesting. Could we get a link
for them
- A: Will be Linked in this document above after talk
- Q:Have you looked at taking handwritted notes on a tablet like
Xournal++
- A: Not yet,
- Q: Something to think about is handwritten and org transcribed notes
de-duplication for searching, do you want one or the other, both?
- A:
- side note: org-remark could be useful for this
<https://github.com/nobiot/org-remark>
- Q: How fancy has your handwritten notes import been to org mode,
Bullets, TODO , org tables etc\...
- A: Bala uses an asterisk on paper when writing tasks, and makes
them into org tasks during manual transcription. Would be really
cool to OCR org constructs from paper. TODO items etc.
- Handwriting helps thinking, speaking with an audience. Computers
have led to handwriting being less important, but Bala thinks
they\'re very efficient and important :)
- Q: How often do you instead type in and summarize your notes? Would
you consider that a suitable approach for yourself, e.g. at the end
of the day?
- A: when in a hurry, Bala types notes directly into Org Mode.
- not yet established a habit of daily journaling but wants to
- handwriting can be easier depending on language/script,
non-Roman script
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