How?
Can anyone share a polished workflow for converting handwritten notes on paper to plain text ascii (by this I mean an open-source OCR pipeline)?
Of course, I can transcribe my handwritten notes manually. But there is friction there that keeps me lugging a laptop when I can, and simply doing without note-taking when a laptop isn't available.
A half-way approach I've been using for a little while is simply to take pictures of my notebook pages, which are usually work to-do lists and contacts etc, but also sometimes design notes for a program or idea. Some of them I have put on their own canvas pages in Obsidian and overlaid with boxes and arrows and text. This at least accomplishes storage in a common location, and someday when there is an Obsidian handwriting recognition plug-in, I'll be ready to go!
Exactly. I'm one of those who typically hand writes, and then later converts to digital if it's worth keeping. Typing stuff up is a real drag, and I don't think any OCR is even close to being good enough for it.
I often fantasize about finding cheap labor in another country to type it up for me.
Comments
speaking to the heart of the article:
How? Can anyone share a polished workflow for converting handwritten notes on paper to plain text ascii (by this I mean an open-source OCR pipeline)?
Of course, I can transcribe my handwritten notes manually. But there is friction there that keeps me lugging a laptop when I can, and simply doing without note-taking when a laptop isn't available.
A half-way approach I've been using for a little while is simply to take pictures of my notebook pages, which are usually work to-do lists and contacts etc, but also sometimes design notes for a program or idea. Some of them I have put on their own canvas pages in Obsidian and overlaid with boxes and arrows and text. This at least accomplishes storage in a common location, and someday when there is an Obsidian handwriting recognition plug-in, I'll be ready to go!
This is something I want to explore in other things I write. Being able to transcribe is definitely a big hurdle at the moment.
Exactly. I'm one of those who typically hand writes, and then later converts to digital if it's worth keeping. Typing stuff up is a real drag, and I don't think any OCR is even close to being good enough for it.
I often fantasize about finding cheap labor in another country to type it up for me.