HOW TO… Convert your handwriting to digital text

What you need: iOS, Android or Windows device Time required: 30 minutes

It doesn’t take long to become a proficient typist, but even the quickest fingers will be slower at transcribing handwritten text than an app that can transcribe text from a photo. Likewise, when you’re taking notes or jotting down ideas as they occur, it will often be more convenient to scribble these using a pen or finger than to record those thoughts using a keyboard.

Here, we explore options for converting handwritten notes into typed text, using iOS, Android and Windows. We were expecting that the accuracy of our results would depend on the clarity of our handwriting, but we were pleasantly surprised by the versatility and effectiveness of the tools we used.

Convert handwriting on your phone

Now on version 5, has long been one of the best-known and most flexible OCR (optical character recognition) programs available for iOS. It’s free to download from , although handwriting