E-Ink Table HANDWRITING-TO-TEXT CONVERSION: Boox, reMarkable, Supernote & Kindle Compared

[@M.Hatch.]

Useful overview and tutorial. Making instructionals like this might be useful.

[@ewritable]

Cheers, mate. I may do some more like this as I try to improve my video creation skills.

[@jeffreymoss]

Great overview!

[@ewritable]

Cheers mate. It originally included Bigme and Kobo as well but I was running out of time, and when the battery ran out the Bigme Stylus, and I couldn't find my Kobo Stylus, I though 'sod it' and just removed them from the overview lol.

[@doktorfaustus]

@@ewritable Kobo is not worth the effort. The handwriting experience is terrible with the active stylus, and for me the device crashes on average once every ten minutes when trying to write in a notebook. Usually it only loses the last paragraph or so of writing, but I have had Kobo eat whole notebooks. This is not a flaw in one particular example; my experience has been the same on both a Sage and an Elipsa 2E, running the same software. Kobos are great ereaders, but for note taking or writing, they are so horrifically bad I simply dismiss them from consideration.

[@ewritable]

@@doktorfaustus couldn't agree with you more. Awful writing experience on Kobos primarily because they don't use the Wacom EMR. Another thing I really dislike about Kobo is the toolbar that obscures a significant area of the notetaking canvas (in standard notebooks). I mention a lot of these issues in my reviews of the Libra Colour and Elipsa 2E on the eWritable.com website. I also talk about the Elipsa being the only e-ink tablet that has ever broken on me and the difficulties I had with their customer support team. Kobos do have a few positives - as you say they are great for reading ebooks and I really like some of the features of advanced notebooks (such as formulae conversion). But imo they are nowhere near their competition as a notetaking device.

[@rgsr5244]

With the rM2, I after I convert it I just go to my laptop or desktop and continue typing from the remarkable app or simply copy the text to a word document or something like that. It’s strange that Boox’s app suck. Don’t know about Supernote. Still, the recognition in this devices is great.

[@doktorfaustus]

One thing I did not see you test, and which is critical to my workflow, is how the respective devices handle paragraphs (or fail to). I only have personal experience with reMarkable and Boox. Boox is terrible in this regard: Your only options are to have line breaks at the end of every handwritten line, or to have a huge blob of text with no formatting at all. You must then manually remove or add line breaks where they are appropriate. For all its many shortcomings, reMarkable is the only platform, in my experience, on which the handwriting to text converter grasps the concept of paragraphs and applies line breaks correctly. If I am writing out a long draft, I don't want the added step and delay of manually parsing the whole text to recreate the paragraphs I already formatted when writing it by hand. I have no experience with Supernote; perhaps it does a better job than Boox, but it could scarcely do better than reMarkable, which handles at least this one aspect of text conversion superbly.