I take a lot of handwritten notes. I recently started experimenting with taking those notes digitally. In this post I’ll outline several methods I tested for recognizing handwriting in order to make my notes searchable. See my post about the results I got.
Microsoft Lens
This app has an “actions” mode that can convert “printed text”. In my tests it had the best recognition of my handwriting. Although, it was relatively slow.
iPhone Select Text
On iPhone you can scan an image. Select the icon in the bottom right and then select “copy all”. This comes free with the iPhone.
Android
I hope there is an option built into Android. I need to get my old Pixel phone out and find out.
Google Keep
In Google Keep you can paste an image of a note and then use the Grab Image text option to convert it to text and append that text into the note.
Rocketbook
You can use Rocketbook to scan a note. When you do, the note becomes searchable in the Rocketbook app itself. It does not give you the text, but ties you to the app, which is free today.
CamScanner
A popular free app with annoying advertising. The paid version can scan handwriting. Available for iPhone, Android, MacOs, Windows, and web. $60 per year subscription on iPhone.
Tesseract
Tesseract is a command line utility for OCR. I didn’t get great results with it but they also weren’t the worst I tried. A couple advantages it has is that it can run automatically from the command line and it doesn’t upload your notes over the internet. It processes locally.
Adobe Scan
This one barely works for handwriting.
Written by Joel Dare on March 12, 2024.