It's funny, I would have thought that OCR on handwriting on a tablet would be great, because they can capture each individual stroke, rather than just the final pixelated product. In other words, because you're witnessing it being written, there's a lot more information. In fact I wouldn't even call it OCR because it's not "optical", but rather "stroke" -- SCR?

Is that something that exists? Is that what the tablet tries to do and fails? Or is it only trying to OCR after-the-fact, in which case I'm not surprised it's terrible.

there is no OCR on device fullstop, which in itself would be fine if it happened async in the background.

You can use the OCR feature only in the companion desktop app, explicitly selecting pages you want to run the process on. The result is better than it used to be but still not great and, importantly, it does NOT seem they make any difference if you later on do a search on the device

This is the biggest issue for me as well. Seems that the OCR has to be triggered manually, for each page of each notebook. Which of course I don't remember to do and now there are too many.

The search doesn't appear to search across notebooks either.

The experience that I would want (expect) is that OCR happens in the background, all the time, no need to trigger and that I can then search for a word/string and find all the notes on that topic.

I've fallen back to tags and dates in filenames to have any chance of tracking down old meeting notes.

Well, you can do OCR while using the device but... it's not on device. The device has to be connected to the Internet for OCR to work. I've never checked where does it connect to do it, as I never use it...

but the result is not subsequently used for full text indexing and searching (on device or on desktop) therefore it's useless

Yep, totally.

Apple newton did it. They required you to stroke your letters in a pedantically correct way because it used the stroke path, not the end pixel appearance, to detect letters.

I genuinely liked the Palm Graffiti. It took a couple of days of playing Giraffe to get used to it, but afterwards the speed and precision was quite decent. Of course it's nothing compared to modern swipe keyboards but still.

Agreed, I often miss Palm's Graffiti input, I don't remember it well at all at this point I think I tried a similar input on android and went back to gesture keyboard. Of course, I kind of miss even developing for Palm as well, which was far simpler an experience than what Android and iOS are today.

Then again, rose colored glasses and all.

That got a lot better w/ v2 of Rosetta (also known as Calligrapher).

Recognition for me was about perfect, and I took notes on my Newton MessagePad using a 3rd party outliner in almost all of my college classes (art history was the exception --- used the main Newton app for that, along w/ little sketches and reference folios to the text which I then faxed to the fax machine in the Art Department's office for a student who had a learning disability which prevented his taking notes --- turns out that he then shared them with everyone in the dorms, which I found out about after the course was over when the professor noted how much better everyone's grades were that year and how she had found out when asking other students.

So did palmOS "Graffiti" input. It was fun!

I had a Sony-Erickson phone with a resistive touch screen and full keyboard and a stylus. Very futuristic for the aughts! They also forced writing letters in a very specific way, in order to trigger OCR.

In the old Palm Pilot days the way the OCR worked is you had to do the strokes in a special software approved manner, your natural stroke motion wasn't acceptable, you were expected to learn to write in a special shorthand system called Graffiti.

I'd imagine going by stroke order would be a bit tricky since a lot of people don't write the way their teachers taught them to write. (Think anybody with bad handwriting).

In research this is called Online Handwriting Recognition

reMarkable does Online Handwriting Recognition with MyScript running in the cloud, not on the tablet https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2

I'm absolutely fine without OCR and searching if they can give us working links. All I want to do is to be able to doodle a star on a page, or a word, and have that work as a link off to another page in another notebook. That's all you need for a zettelkasten-style system to hold your notes in but I've not seen anyone do it.

Supernote has links, as does Boox. There is a specific Star based system for Supernote but I never quite got the hang of that, but I use the linking features extensively to link to pages of PDFs for more extended notes about them, and to serve as a sort of directory / tree structure for notes and subjects. I keep my notes structure fairly flat for that reason, there aren’t many folders.

I’d’ve shelled out $800 first thing this morning for an RM Pro if they added linking across the system.

Seems like they've improved the processor (at least the latency is lower) and that might help to add new features or improve pdf responsiveness, but they're still lacking on the software side, and even simple QOL features like the ones that rmhacks adds aren't available by default.

I feel like it falls short on the reading side (not searching, dictionary, note management...), and short on the notes side (simple drawing tools, no dashed lines, no shapes, and I think you can't even position text on the wherever you like on the page).

I really liked the initial hackability, as you have SSH access to the Linux inside the device, and people was building software to run on it, but seems like due to some changes since v3.4 of the firmware, it's either very difficult (or not possible) to do it, and the ideas I had for using it aren't feasible right now.

The price for the color model is (at least in Europe) already higher than a Boox Note Air3C, that's a full fledged Android tablet. Of course, the battery won't last as long even with all the optimizations, but is a bit lighter, has more resolution, and you can put whatever software you like that runs in Android. I haven't tested the software, though...

TLDR: not sure about this :(

Yeah... New product looks fantastic, but finding your notes will still be a pain. You have to be diligently organized with folders and notebooks to find anything.

Agreed. I got the RM2 because I thought it’d be “a notebook I can search.” No. I regret every piece of writing that has ended up locked up inside that device vs on paper notebooks.

It’s like an anti-discovery device.

I was hoping rM3 will be about improved OCR, and ideally a GPT chat app with integrated pen - just use GPT4v or something. Their AI integrations are shit.