Capturing handwritten notes - Surface 2 / Windows 8

FrankGrimes

I have a Surface 2 (not the Pro) for general leisure and light work use and a Dell XPS 12 convertible notebook I use for work. I’m a heavy user of OneNote and capture most of my notes on there and sync them via OneNote. I only use handwriting for capturing actions and notes in meetings where the general etiquette is not to have laptops open – they are fairly few as digital note capturing is the norm in most cases in my work, but for the few occasions I need to do handwritten, not having it synced in with the rest of my OneNote notes and actions list is a bummer.

I’d like to find a way of capturing handwritten notes digitally. This could either be with a stylus pen (if I’m handwriting in a meeting it’s clear I’m not on email) or capturing notes on paper and transferring them to digital after. I’m not sure if there are any stylus pens that work with the Surface 2 and given my experience with stylus pens on Android tablets, it would be good to hear tips on what models work best if any, and what’s the best software for capturing input with the stylus – converting the handwriting to text would be a bonus, just capturing the graphics of what I have scrawled would be fine.

Livescribe offer a number of different pens where you write the notes on special paper and it then transfers to digital notes afterwards. It’s quite hard to tell which ones have what features and which are compatible with Windows 8, seems latest version is just iOS. It’s also the type of thing that would be good to hear experiences on that or something similar that people have found works.

My ultimate goal is to get every note I capture to end up in OneNote (I’d go EverNote only if unavoidable, but would probably just copy and paste from there to OneNote as I have OneNote setup the way I want) – being paper free isn’t the goal, it’s to have the convenience of having everything I capture in the one place, so would be great to hear thoughts on best way to achieve that. Thanks.

delos

On a Windows Phone Papyrus lets you "share" handwritten notes as a jpg and you can sync them using the cloud or save them to the phone - if it's available for the Surface 2 I assume you can save to the device.

Integration with OneNote might be a bit clunky but Office Lens will add them to OneNote for you as an Unfiled Note. Not sure how to get them converted to text though. Again I don't know if this is available for the Surface.

Might be worth taking a look at?

[If you are simply scanning paper documents you should be able to use Office Lens here too, but again, I don't know about converting the handwritten text to editable text.]

kayos

I have used hand writing in One Note on my Surface 2 without much issues.

Just change the on screen keyboard to the handwriting mode(middle option) and use a stylus.

If you want to hand annotate notes you can also just use the draw mode.

All of these get sync'd fine for me

ablelocks

I have the maglus stylus and will be testing it with onenote and surface rt next week - will let you know how I get on.

ablelocks

ablelocks wrote: »

I have the maglus stylus and will be testing it with onenote and surface rt next week - will let you know how I get on.

first used the maglus with the silicone tip, and it wasn't great for handwriting to be honest. But they recently released a microfibre tip that works very well. (kudos to them - they sent me a free microfibre tip)

however, I have recently borrowed an Adonit Jot pro, and this seems to work the best so will be buying one.

Overheal

FrankGrimes wrote: »

I have a Surface 2 (not the Pro) for general leisure and light work use and a Dell XPS 12 convertible notebook I use for work. I’m a heavy user of OneNote and capture most of my notes on there and sync them via OneNote. I only use handwriting for capturing actions and notes in meetings where the general etiquette is not to have laptops open – they are fairly few as digital note capturing is the norm in most cases in my work, but for the few occasions I need to do handwritten, not having it synced in with the rest of my OneNote notes and actions list is a bummer.

I’d like to find a way of capturing handwritten notes digitally. This could either be with a stylus pen (if I’m handwriting in a meeting it’s clear I’m not on email) or capturing notes on paper and transferring them to digital after. I’m not sure if there are any stylus pens that work with the Surface 2 and given my experience with stylus pens on Android tablets, it would be good to hear tips on what models work best if any, and what’s the best software for capturing input with the stylus – converting the handwriting to text would be a bonus, just capturing the graphics of what I have scrawled would be fine.

Livescribe offer a number of different pens where you write the notes on special paper and it then transfers to digital notes afterwards. It’s quite hard to tell which ones have what features and which are compatible with Windows 8, seems latest version is just iOS. It’s also the type of thing that would be good to hear experiences on that or something similar that people have found works.

My ultimate goal is to get every note I capture to end up in OneNote (I’d go EverNote only if unavoidable, but would probably just copy and paste from there to OneNote as I have OneNote setup the way I want) – being paper free isn’t the goal, it’s to have the convenience of having everything I capture in the one place, so would be great to hear thoughts on best way to achieve that. Thanks.

Jesus Frank I'm sorry.

I worked at Best Buy the last 3 years, and my computer reccomendations varied between the Surface Pro and the XPS 12. I love the design on the XPS and if only for the want of a stylus would it be the supreme badass.

But alas. I'm going to assume selling both units and going in for a Surface Pro are out of the question? That would give you the functionality offered by both. Which is why I'm sorry: you have the 2 things that can't do the one thing you wanna do.

I can already tell you that any stylus - even the fancy Jot-Pro, can be finnicky at best. Because you still have Capacative Screen woes: when your palm wrests on the screen, you're not writing any damn thing. Wacom and Jot make bluetooth models for iOS that I hear work OK, and I've had colleagues buy and try who say they work (but they don't "get" the idea of paying that much to write on their screen. Sigh)

Livescribe pens have their following. I've never used one, the drawback will inevitably be that it's tied to that paper like a printer is tied to ink. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a thing. Bamboo makes the Inkling which I've been interested in seeing in the flesh since announcement but I have no hard data: http://www.wacom.com/en/us/creative/inkling in all likelihood, it would be awesome for your needs and eliminate special paper needs. But compare it thoughtfully against the livescribe. Thoughts from Livescribes site about OneNote: https://support.livescribe.com/entries/20733406-onenote-integration

You could always try just pasting PDF/Images into OneNote but the results suck. Using this image, which was the first result I found in bing that seemed like it would pass through OCR without turning to vomit:



I got this out:

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Can be considE2ATE AND
WRAP UP yo VR NASTY SANITARY
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IN THE UTTLE ehsxe-r?
I Do NOT TO SEE
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HATE IT HHEN 1M ON PERIOD
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VAGINAI

So yeah. It's not great.

Review of Inkling suggest no direct OneNote integration but thats unsurprising: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399985,00.asp the same story applies to Livescribe.

I on the other hand, have been using the Surface stylus to directly ink notes into OneNote, and I wouldn't change a thing about it. From what I understand though, OneNote is also on Android finally, and on a Galaxy Note phone or tablet, the same sense of amazement ought to apply.

Direct inking is STRONGLY reccomended, as the handwriting recognition when done directly is far, far more accurate, and the notes then become part of the Windows Search Index - so a quick Win+F search (or Ctrl+E to narrow search to inside of OneNote while in program) of "Integration by Parts" will link me directly to the notebook and the day that I was in class learning about that heathen topic. Caveat being the Notebook must be loaded and synced on the PC of course - just tried it to prove my point and since I wiped windows last week I had to give it a minute.

FrankGrimes

Thanks for that very useful info. Will have a think about it but reckon my best bet may now be to wait for a Surface Pro 3 as ink will be more tightly integrated.

Overheal

integrated how?