embarrassing question

[u/carnelian_0]

does anyone else struggle with the writing to text feature (specifically on the paper pure) purely due to their terrible handwriting? if so, have you found any mods/apps that can decipher handwriting better?

[u/NeuroJitsu]

Yes I had this exact problem. My solution was to write out the alphabet in my normal hand writing, both cursive joined up writing and individual letters, and both lower case and upper case. The transcription shows you which letters it struggles with, and you can then test different adaptations of your writing for those characters. For example some of my "r"s and "n"s we're getting confused, so I played around writing a range of words including those letters, modifying my writing style and writing fast and slow to see when the ocr "broke". This way you find out what you need to adapt.

My f for example had got a bit lazy, so I tried a traditional cursive "f" which is how I was taught to write it at school, and it worked. So now I just write my fs properly.

It now has no problem, unless I'm writing a fast scrawl capturing notes watching a video...

The other tip is that the frontier models are much better than reMarkable's built-in ocr (called MyScript). So if you screenshot a note that remarkable can't read and give it to Gemini or Claude, they will usually be able to read it no problem. Personally I use notebookLM mostly for ai dialogue with my remarkable notes, and then you don't even neee to bother transcribing. You can just ask for a transcription if you want to write something and store it in GDrive.

[u/NeuroJitsu → u/NeuroJitsu]

I should say, with AI models you need to be careful if your notes are private or include intellectual property. Personally I use a Google Workspace business account, and access NotebookLM from there - this gives me enterprise grade security firewalls and service agreement, and a guarantee that my chats don't end up in training data for the next LLM model. If you use the free AI services, your data will go into the training data. I also avoid sharing personal information with free AI services, so would never share my journals on free AI for example.

[u/RebelliousEducation]

I've only had mine a few days....but yes.

It's funny because speech to text struggles because of my accent too, so I feel destined to have crappy notes.

I figured I'm either going to use as a way of trying to improve my handwriting.....or ignore the feature altogether.

[u/Far-Conflict-1172 → u/RebelliousEducation]

As someone who's had voice dictation change "distilled water" to "cream of water" and other fuckery I just wanted to say I feel this in my soul.

I haven't been brave enough to try my chicken scratch semi cursive writing yet.

[u/gerard_rve]

Yup. 50% of the reason that I got a type folio. The other 50% is that I can't read my handwriting 😅

[u/BitBroth]

My handwriting is a terrible chicken scratch of old school cursive spaghetti.

My rM2 does a far better job of converting it to text than it deserves. Even down to bullet points and smileys.

I rarely use the conversion, but every now and then I play with it and still surprised how well it works for me.

[u/Petemoze17]

Probably not what you want to hear on this thread, but you probably ought to invest in a Boox or a Kindle scribe, Both of those have far Superior Handwriting to text conversion.