Writing/note recognition, searchability and recommendations to Onyx/Boox

In order to get the best handwriting recognition (when using both AI to convert to typewritten text or when just searching handwriting using the search box), here are a couple of tips.

I’ve noticed that my Max 3 gets pretty confused when my writing is not quite horizontal. If you can’t keep your lines horizontal when using a blank sheet, use the ruled paper option.

AI text conversion gets quite messed up and interchanges words from one line with those from another when lines are too close together. In particular, I see that with my handwriting, if the ascenders ascend higher than the previous line’s descenders, AI gets confused.

Something that might not be obvious to everyone is that notes can be left in handwritten format and still be searchable (though keep in mind the other comments I’ve made here). One “problem” is that the search is case sensitive, so if you’re searching in handwritten notes, either print or cursive, you should enter the search terms using the exact case used in the notes, otherwise the words won’t be found. For example, a search for “whenever” will not find “Whenever”, or “WHENEVER”.

@claire, I’m sure that anyone with one of your note-taking devices sees the ability to take notes as one of the key features they paid for. Please, please, let R&D know that a high priority should be placed on improving things in this area.

Some of these have been asked in other threads, but I will re-emphasize:

  • fix AI so that words from different lines don’t get interchanged. When this happens, a note loses a lot of its value
  • fix AI so that words which are clearly separated by a space in handwriting are not converted to a single underlined word. Sure, these can be easily separated out by touching the underlined word and selecting the correct choice, but it happens too often and it is a pain to have to do it when the original handwriting had clearly separated words.
  • fix AI so that periods are not lost
  • enhance AI so that it can deal with embedded drawings/diagrams (possibly by providing a checkbox to create these on another “layer” which would be ignored during recognition)
  • allow handwriting lines to be closer together and still be properly recognized
  • fix searching in notes so that it is case insensitive by default, and provide a checkbox to make it case sensitive
  • when exporting to OneNote notebooks, export to the ink format used by OneNote so that notes can be further edited in that application, rather than as a PDF
  • an alternative to exporting to OneNote would be to create a OneNote plugin through which the Onyx Notes application could pop up to allow handwritten notes to be created within the OneNote application

Great ideas here!

I havent used the note app too much but i will definetely try these tips.

And i agree with all the fixes too