[HN Gopher] A return to hand-written notes by learning to read a...
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A return to hand-written notes by learning to read and write
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 559 points
Date : 2024-10-28 21:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (research.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (research.google)
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| This is very cool. Here is interesting application of something
| like this. My handwriting is pretty bad, and worse still when
| writing fast. When I am teaching, a lot of what I write is worse
| than I would like it to be.
|
| I could teach a system like this my very slow neat handwriting.
| And then as I write on my whiteboard while teaching, it replaces
| my quick bad handwriting with the neater handwriting.
| rnewme wrote:
| Why not simply have a laser projector, keyboard and canvas
| textbox then?
| elashri wrote:
| From a quick visit to his profile (linked website), he is a
| physicist. This technology setup is very complicated and
| against the eternal usage of blackboard in a typical physics
| department. And to be honest this applies to his suggestion
| as well but you still at least get the feeling on writing on
| a board.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Of course, all true physics happens on the blackboard, in a
| notebook (or in Mathematica).
|
| But, I am forced to use digital tools occasionally, and I
| am not opposed to improving them.
| nine_k wrote:
| You also need the skill of lightning-fast LaTeX typing, and
| the skill of drawing and drafting with a speed comparable to
| that of a chalk. You need a canvas-driven tool for that, and
| your eyes would be on the screen for long periods of time,
| not contacting the audience.
| rnewme wrote:
| There are regular white/blackboards that you write on with
| regular marker that just has a tracker on it, so content
| appears on the canvas on screen for those who are remote.
| More advanced versions also have laser projector that can
| project animations, moving diagrams and text on the same
| board. My suggestion is to tap the board on the place he
| wants to write and just type it on regular keyboard, hardly
| a distraction!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Wouldn't it make even more sense to replace your quick bad
| handwriting with perfect Helvetica?
| recursive wrote:
| Hard to make boxes and arrows out of helvetica, and basically
| impossible to do it quickly
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Fine, make it Helvetica plus whatever other shapes you
| need. I would assume that Helvetica includes most of
| extended unicode, since it's such a widely used font, but I
| could be wrong, and it's beside the point.
|
| If the computer is the one transforming your writing it
| should be perfectly quick.
|
| To be clear, afaik current handwriting recognition software
| is not good enough for this. But _if_ we had software that
| could transform bad handwriting into good handwriting, why
| not go all the way?
| advael wrote:
| Cuz quality is not equivalent to standardization, and
| sometimes the latter is undesirable
| loginx wrote:
| I got a stylus for my iPad and i felt that way at the
| beginning but I learned that i visualize in my head what I'm
| going to create right before I draw, and the difference
| between what's in my mind vs what gets produced is so great,
| that it feels like a weird uncanny valley and i hate the
| output.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| There is (subjective) charm in handwritten text that is
| simply not present in digital fonts. I would rather keep that
| magic alive.
| deepGem wrote:
| I think handwriting is a very personal trait. Some people
| value good handwriting and they write neat even when they
| write fast. Others don't. Sadly, a vast majority if the
| world exists in the other camp. This is why they invented
| typewriters. If everyone conformed to good handwriting and
| could agree upon a good writing style standard, the world
| would have been very different.
| eru wrote:
| > This is why they invented typewriters.
|
| Historically, that didn't seem to be the main reason for
| the many inventions of the typewriter. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#History
| imoverclocked wrote:
| That wikipedia article was a great read but I have to
| agree with GP.
|
| > According to the standards taught in secretarial
| schools in the mid-20th century, a business letter was
| supposed to have no mistakes and no visible corrections.
|
| Certainly, there were other reasons like speed,
| repeatability, official-looking, etc... too. Most
| typewriters wanted to be cheaper and on-demand printing
| presses. Some even managed variable width fonts! :)
| eru wrote:
| Oh, the original comment is certainly right in spirit, I
| just wanted to be pedantic.
|
| But I'm not sure why you quote something about the
| md-20th century, when we are talking about the (many)
| invention(s) of the typewriter? They were already old and
| well-established technology at that point in time.
| sfilmeyer wrote:
| I've known people who valued good handwriting but weren't
| particularly capable of writing neatly, and others who
| didn't particularly value it but were capable of staying
| neat while writing quickly. I think you might be
| overestimating how much of it is tied to what people
| value.
| solveit wrote:
| I like good handwriting, but good, fast handwriting takes
| thousands of hours of practice. We used to spend a good
| chunk of school drilling it into kids, but now it's
| really hard to justify _everyone_ spend that kind of time
| when we can technology our way around it and there are
| other valuable skills to learn.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| That's the same argument for using calculators in the
| past 30 years and ChatGPT in the last few years. At some
| point, we lose far more than we gain by "technology our
| way around" our early development.
|
| Why bother having campfires when we have portable space
| heaters? Heck, why bother camping at all if we have a
| nice comfortable space at home? More generally, why do
| any of the things that connect us to our past?
|
| Personally, I think it's important to learn by doing and
| then provide a "here is how we made that easier, and now
| you know why" type of foundation. Perhaps better is
| having people develop versions of those solutions for
| themselves so we don't just expect someone else to solve
| all of our problems.
| Neonlicht wrote:
| If you live in an urbanised country you don't build a lot
| of campfires- besides there are rules on air quality that
| prohibit them.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Not necessarily - your handwriting can sometimes be subtly
| optimized to the sort of subject matter you write about. For
| example, when I write lowercase T, I give it a little hook at
| the bottom. I also write my lowercase L in the cursive form,
| the tall skinny loop. That keeps similar-looking letters that
| I use a lot distinct. There must be other examples.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| In my handwriting, the letter x is two crossed lines; the
| algebraic variable x is two Cs back-to-back. This makes it
| more distinct from a multiplication sign.
| sam29681749 wrote:
| When I'm taking notes, I use arrows, squiggly lines, symbols,
| I circle text, etc. which won't necessarily translate to
| typical text block.
| sitkack wrote:
| If you draw your equations well enough, they can get converted
| into LaTex in realtime and then you could run them in a
| computational notebook.
|
| Esp if you fuse the audio of you explaining the equations along
| with the LaTex it can correct for errors.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| What software can do this?
| elashri wrote:
| I think Mathpix API [1] can use used to do something like
| that in realtime/ish
|
| [1] https://mathpix.com/
| rvnx wrote:
| The new Calculator by Apple is supposed to do it (but the
| result is quite underwhelming)
| currymj wrote:
| apple notes on new iPadOS does this right now -- just cleans up
| your handwriting to be slightly neater but still look like you.
| eleveriven wrote:
| That's actually a brilliant feature! Without losing the "you"
| egypturnash wrote:
| Or you could just find some lettering manuals and improve your
| handwriting. Practicing at a slow speed will improve your fast
| work, too.
| znpy wrote:
| > My handwriting is pretty bad
|
| i know it might sound dumb, but have you tried playing with a
| fountain pen?
|
| The feedback is way different from a ballpoint pen and it also
| depends on paper and the kind of ink. It makes writing way less
| "predictable" and a bit more enjoyable.
|
| a cheap one (5-15$) with a medium nib might be a good start...
| some people move on to collect fountain pens, but i do most on
| my (on paper) writing with a ~20$ Pelikan Jazz.
| xarope wrote:
| I've realized that when I use cheap pens on hotel stationery,
| my handwriting looks terrible, probably because the surfaces
| are too smooth? Other than fountain pens, are there other
| alternatives that give more tactile feedback?
| sam29681749 wrote:
| IMO felt tip pens feel comparatively rough to gel, and
| ballpoint pen, etc.
| mbivert wrote:
| Nibs / dip-pens ;-)
|
| It's only half a joke: having to regularly dip the pen in
| ink, be mindful of how much ink you have, having to swiftly
| wipe it once in a while to avoid drying ink (& flow
| issues), forces to slow down & take "micro-breaks".
|
| This benefits the handwriting, but also the quality of the
| study. And is surprisingly relaxing.
|
| (so called "crow-quill" nibs are relatively cheap,
| available, carry a fair amount of ink)
| wrp wrote:
| What you are asking for is more "tooth", something mostly
| determined by the paper. Most stationery fans prefer
| smoother papers, but I agree that after a certain point,
| increased smoothness makes my handwriting worse.
|
| If you are stuck using a very smooth paper, I would suggest
| either a fiber-tip or a drier gel pen. Gel pens with a
| clicker (e.g. Zebra Sarasa) tend to write drier than those
| with a cap (e.g. Uniball Signo). Also try a fatter tip.
| Although this may not be acceptable in many situations, a
| soft pencil may provide even better control on smooth
| paper.
| komali2 wrote:
| I write a lot with a fountain pen and if anything it made it
| harder to understand my handwriting... even the next day I'll
| have a hard time.
|
| I've considered the "just learn to write better" approach and
| I've tried here and there but I've been handwriting journals
| for 28 years and I'm just not sure it's possible to write
| cleanly at the speed I handwrite at this point. Especially
| since it's in cursive.
| sam29681749 wrote:
| I can't imagine anyone writing at their 'fastest' is going
| to produce something that is broadly legible.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Slow means smooth, smooth means fast.
| sph wrote:
| I know your comment is in earnest and I don't mean to make
| fun of you, but there is something so funny in our
| Americanised world where everything is reduced to _" it's not
| you, you just need to buy the correct gizmo that will solve
| all your problems."_
|
| Fountain pens enthusiasts are like music gear or mechanical
| keyboard enthusiasts, that justify their hobby and believe
| spending on the next shiny thing is the key to fulfil their
| whatever, until the next shiny thing arrives.
|
| The thing is... if one dislikes or doesn't care about writing
| that they have basically forgotten how to, it is not spending
| money on a fancy writing implement that is gonna turn them
| into a medieval monk scribe.
| Woeps wrote:
| > The thing is... if one dislikes or doesn't care about
| writing that they have basically forgotten how to, it is
| not spending money on a fancy writing implement that is
| gonna turn them into a medieval monk scribe.
|
| The thing is, it does actually... Because it "forces" you
| to slow down and take time for it.
|
| I hated writing (heavily dyslexic) but after getting a
| fountainpen and purposely slowing down I noticed it went
| better. Now I write in my own language again, I spend whole
| evenings writing scenes, essays, debates and letters.
|
| Sometimes it is the tool that forces a bit of change (if
| you want to change of course).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _but there is something so funny in our Americanised
| world where everything is reduced to "it's not you, you
| just need to buy the correct gizmo that will solve all your
| problems."_
|
| OTOH, it's an improvement over the other world of solving
| everything through "discipline" and other kinds of wishful
| thinking.
|
| Like, you can complain and worry that your kid can't seem
| to learn how to cut things right with their scissors, try
| to force some discipline and conscientiousness into them -
| or you can stop causing them and yourself so much grief and
| realize that a left-handed person needs _left-handed
| scissors_ , as using the wrong type for your hand works to
| prevent the cutting action.
| znpy wrote:
| > OTOH, it's an improvement over the other world of
| solving everything through "discipline" and other kinds
| of wishful thinking.
|
| kinda, the truth is somewhere in between in my opinion.
|
| most things related to our body movement do require
| training to be mastered.
|
| I think that writing is no different endeavur. It's just
| that fountain pens can make it more pleasant.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Having a good pen really helps a lot with writing. I'm not
| a fountain pen enthusiast, I don't even have one. I just
| noticed that there's a huge difference between a ballpoint
| pen and a "rolling ballpoint pen". The naming is confusing,
| since the ballpoint pen should also be "rolling", but
| whatever.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Ballpoint pens use a viscous ink that, like graphite in a
| pencil, needs pressure to be applied. Rollerballs and
| fountain pens both use low-viscosity inks that flow
| simply from being touched to the paper.
|
| The latter requires much less effort to write (no
| constant pressure) and enables writing with the hand held
| mostly still, using the larger muscles of the upper arm
| and shoulder to create the letters. The downside is that
| they can create impressively large ink blots on your
| clothing if uncapped/unretracted, and the ink can be
| smeared if you touch it while wet. But pretty much every
| writing system still out there in use (i.e., not
| cuneiform or runes) was designed with a quill or brush as
| the instrument.
| sph wrote:
| > But pretty much every writing system still out there in
| use (i.e., not cuneiform or runes) was designed with a
| quill or brush as the instrument.
|
| That's if you know cursive. I don't think the standard
| small-case script most people use in their everyday life
| is quill-friendly.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Your style might have to change a bit, but disconnected
| letters were quite common in medieval Roman-style
| scripts, which were definitely written with quills.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| > that flow simply from being touched to the paper
|
| Or just by itself if you bring it with you on a plane :)
|
| This looks like a perfect rabbit hole I'd be wise to
| avoid. At least I have a good excuse of being left handed
| since I would be constantly smearing all the wet ink.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Although it's not a beginner fountain pen in terms of
| cost (though it is not _too_ expensive, basic models
| around $160), the Pilot /Namiki Vanishing Point is a
| retractable fountain pen that does not leak when
| retracted.
|
| The cartridges for it can, of course, get expensive, but
| a 1 mL syringe and a big bottle of ink (even Mont Blanc
| ink is only $25 for 60 mL) will let you refill them
| cheaply.
| znpy wrote:
| I made the original suggestion explicitly to avoid the
| rabbitholes.
|
| I use a Pelikan Jazz (20$) and a bucket of black
| cartidriges (100 pieces) I got off amazon for like 8$
| (like two years ago).
|
| I got a kaweco fountain pen a few months ago and i
| honestly regret spending those money, it's a shitty pen,
| some of the most dumbly-wasted money of my life.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| > Fountain pens enthusiasts are like music gear or
| mechanical keyboard enthusiasts
|
| There is a subreddit /r/mechanicalheadpens for these three
| specific interests.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The recommendation was to try a $5-15 pen.
|
| That's a long way from what you're describing.
|
| It's exactly what millions of schoolchildren are required
| to use when they're learning to write.
| sph wrote:
| Sure, but billions of people can write just fine with a
| $0.50 ballpoint pen.
|
| Also, it's not $25 or $2,500 that will stop you from
| doing 95% of your writing on a physical and smartphone
| keyboard because that's how society works nowadays. This
| comment cannot be written with a fountain pen, nor my
| work emails or communication with friends and relatives.
| Many people can't write any more simply because they
| don't really have to.
| kstrauser wrote:
| A LAMY Safari with its triangle grip vastly improved my
| handwriting by forcing me to use a different grip than I'd
| naturally use. So yes, _for me_ , the correct cheap gizmo
| solved all my problems.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've played with different miracle gizmos all my life,
| nothing worked. When I go slow and careful I can write
| like a 2nd grader. As a kid my teachers were constantly
| mad at me until one realized I was trying and got me
| testing - sadly dysgraphia (likely the diagnosis I
| needed, though I was never formally diagnosed) wouldn't
| exist for several more years and so I couldn't get the
| right help. (if any help exists, I haven't been able to
| find anything useful and I'm not sure as an adult if it
| is worth the time - there are so many other things I can
| do instead)
| kstrauser wrote:
| To be clear, the Safari showed me that I can write
| without loathing the process. I feel I've given it a fair
| shot, though, and I'm back to typing everything instead.
| I'll use a paper and a pen to jot quick notes during a
| meeting or something but that's the extent of it.
|
| Turns out I can get by just fine with hardly ever
| handwriting anything. The only people disappointed by
| this are my elementary school teachers who had insisted
| this was something I needed to care about.
| graemep wrote:
| I definitely write better with some pens than with others,
| and probably best with fountain pens (I have lost my best
| fountain pen though).
|
| Its not going to make me write like a scribe creating an
| illuminated manuscript, but there is an awful lot of room
| for "better" between that and my usual handwriting with a
| cheap ball point.
| fatbird wrote:
| It would be more charitable to say that the change forced
| upon yourself by changing your instrument is a
| straightforward way of making you mindful of what you're
| doing and make it easier to break bad habits. Yes, you can
| break bad habits by not doing them with the same tools, but
| the objective is to change your behaviour, not to
| demonstrate personal Calvinism.
| znpy wrote:
| > but there is something so funny in our Americanised world
| where everything is reduced to "it's not you, you just need
| to buy the correct gizmo that will solve all your
| problems."
|
| Sigh... I'm not american and i don't live in the US.
|
| > Fountain pens enthusiasts are like music gear or
| mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, that justify their hobby
| and believe spending on the next shiny thing is the key to
| fulfil their whatever, until the next shiny thing arrives.
|
| Yep, I'm aware, that's why i was explicit on the fact that
| a ~20$ Pelikan Jazz is just great and "getting into
| fountain pens" is something that you can definitely avoid
| (I do avoid it, as a matter of fact).
|
| > The thing is... if one dislikes or doesn't care about
| writing that they have basically forgotten how to, it is
| not spending money on a fancy writing implement that is
| gonna turn them into a medieval monk scribe.
|
| you do you i guess. good luck.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I get where you're coming from, but, given that I own
| several pens, and my handwriting really differs depending
| on which pen I'm using, I would say he has a point.
| Changing the pen you use (even within ballpoints) can
| significantly impact your handwriting.
|
| In reality, it's a bit more complicated. I've found the
| following impacts my handwriting:
|
| - Grip format on pen (i.e. shape of pen)
|
| - Ink I'm using
|
| - Paper I'm writing on
|
| - Nib
|
| - And yes, type of pen (ballpoint vs fountain pen)
| creesch wrote:
| Probably good advice if you are right handed and have good
| fine motor skills.
|
| At least way into the 90s kids here learned to write with
| fountain pens. For me this meant pages full of smudges,
| forked pens and generally unreadable text.
|
| As soon as I was allowed to switch to a regular pen my
| handwriting improved a lot (still not great, but better).
| js8 wrote:
| I think you don't even need to go to fountain pens. As a long
| time user of ballpoint pens, I recently started using gel
| pens and I wouldn't go back.
| dogmayor wrote:
| I still prefer using ballpoints with schmidt easyflow 9000
| ink[1], but yeah rollerballs (gel) are a great midpoint
| between fountains and ballpoints. My Zebra G-750[2] is
| super smooth.
|
| [1] https://www.jetpens.com/Schmidt-EasyFlow-9000-Hybrid-
| Ballpoi...
|
| [2] https://www.jetpens.com/Zebra-G-750-Gel-Pen-0.7-mm-
| Black-Ink...
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| You started a flame war. So let me just say that I
| exclusively use a fountain pen to write. That handwriting is
| a lot better. But when writing digitally for teaching or
| meetings, I use a wacom tablet. That is pretty bad for
| writing.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Improving your hand writing is not hard. For whiteboards start
| out with using block letters only. It will slow you down in the
| beginning but not for long.
|
| That's one of the "game changing" hints I received during my
| time as a tutor at university. (One other was to always copy
| books from back to front; very useful but somewhat outdated
| now.)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >One other was to always copy books from back to front; very
| useful but somewhat outdated now.
|
| What's so useful about that?
| hammock wrote:
| Slows you down if I had to guess
| mbreese wrote:
| If your copies come out of the machine right-side up and
| they get stacked on top of each other, then you can just
| take the finished stack from the machine when finished.
| Otherwise, you'd have to reverse the stack, which in real
| life or in a computer is an expensive operation.
| masfuerte wrote:
| My mother had an inkjet printer where the pages came out
| right-side up. Multi-page documents finished up in
| reverse order. It was an infuriatingly awful piece of
| design.
| hammock wrote:
| I thought we were talking about handwriting practice haha
| albert_e wrote:
| The photocopies come out stacked in the right order maybe?
| bee_rider wrote:
| This would be a kind of interesting data structure. A
| stack, FILO, but you can flip it for reading (maybe flip
| is an expensive operation).
| byteknight wrote:
| Grass is good.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Others already said it, but yeah, the copies came out
| ready-to-read. The university had, IIRC, Sharp copiers
| which put out the copy right-side up.
| bilekas wrote:
| > We present a model to convert photos of handwriting into a
| digital format that reproduces component pen strokes, without the
| need for specialized equipment.
|
| Call my a cynic but this feels like a free way for Google to pull
| more data for training.
| byte_0 wrote:
| That's exactly what I thought.
| delduca wrote:
| No evil.
| pkaye wrote:
| There is a repo with Apache license. Does that need to connect
| to Google services to use?
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Sure. You're wrong and a cynic. The model does not connect to
| Google servers (unless you decide to use their colab, which is
| optional), you can use it offline without contributing anything
| back in data or code.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Aside from Google having published open source OCR tools like
| Tesseract for 20 years, it's a thoughtless accusation in
| general. What exactly is the insinuation? "Training" is just
| thrown out as a bogeyman. I can't even come up with a
| fictional scenario in which Google does something nefarious
| with piles of handwritten documents they've somehow acquired.
| sfilmeyer wrote:
| Training doesn't have to be nefarious. Google ran GOOG-411
| in large part to collect speech data, but folks using the
| service still benefited.
| bilekas wrote:
| > I can't even come up with a fictional scenario in which
| Google does something nefarious with piles of handwritten
| documents they've somehow acquired.
|
| I never said it would necessarily be nefarious, but it's
| the same behaviour of data collection from users of free
| services to benefit themselves financially. While not
| always being particularly careful with collected user data.
|
| A slightly related topic is around Google's training on
| YouTube subtitles. They're able to do this because they
| host all the content, but they dont allow owners of that
| content to opt out of that. Again, a free resource that
| Google get to play with as they feel like.
| rgovostes wrote:
| The linked project is an academic paper published
| simultaneously with open source code and a pre-trained,
| locally runnable model.
|
| There is nothing that collects data here, and this is not
| a Google product that users interact with. Hence, there
| is no direct financial gain from this work. Google
| Research has published over 10,000 papers, few of which
| directly impact the commercial side of Google services.
|
| Your example of automated captioning for videos doesn't
| seem particularly objectionable. Does it translate,
| indirectly, to slightly more ad views? Probably, but it's
| a rounding error in their revenue. I am guessing that few
| content creators who publish on YouTube find this feature
| controversial: In addition to free hosting and revenue
| sharing, they don't have to bear the costs of writing
| captions while benefiting from accessibility and
| discoverability.
|
| There are valid complaints against data collection by
| these tech companies for machine learning. Artists have a
| point when they condemn generative models trained on
| their work. And you might reasonably object to the
| collection of handwriting samples that Google used here,
| which were scraped from public Imgur posts (Facebook
| Research's Imgur5K data set).
|
| But there's room for nuance in deciding what uses are
| fair and acceptable without the knee-jerk reaction of
| tech company + AI = evil financial motives.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| I spent a few years doing this without google.
|
| I suggest it, and I suggest it without google.
| henning wrote:
| Can this be used to create deepfake forged
| signatures/handwriting?
| 101008 wrote:
| That was my initial thought too. For some important authors,
| there are a few high quality scans of their manuscripts, so
| with a tool like this you could create fake manuscripts -- and
| in a few years, after they are dead, say that you find them,
| create provenance, and boom, unpublished novel by JK Rowl- any
| author.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| No. It is not designed to be used as a generative model.
|
| But other people have created handwriting generation models.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| If it can generate accurate shapes from a photo of a
| signature, why would you need a generative model? Just draw
| the SVG wherever you need it.
| emporas wrote:
| I tried to use tesseract for OCR, 10 years ago, it recognized
| English good enough. tesseract was also developed by Google if I
| am not mistaken, but open source.
|
| I tried to use it then, for non English language, for Greek, and
| it was very bad.
|
| Happy to see some good OCR research based on transformers.
| 0x38B wrote:
| I've been really impressed with Tesseract - I used it last
| month to add invisible OCR text (1) to scanned PDFs I reference
| a lot. My scans are quite good, but I was still impressed with
| the accuracy.
|
| I also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation
| setting (2) in the terminal until I got output I could copy &
| paste to add a navigable table of contents.
|
| 1: with the help of https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
|
| 2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-
| Usage.h..., " Using different Page Segmentation Modes"
| stavros wrote:
| I OCRed your comment with Tesseract:
|
| ``` I've been really impressed with Tesseract - | used it
| last month to add invisible OCR text (1) to scanned PDFs I
| reference a lot. My scans are quite good, but | was still
| impressed with the accuracy.
|
| | also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation
| setting (2) in the terminal until | got output I could copy &
| paste to add a navigable table of contents.
|
| 1: with the help of https://github.com/ocrmypdfiOCRmyPDE
|
| 2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-
| Usage.h..., " Using different Page Segmentation Modes" ```
|
| This kind of mirrors my earlier experience with Tesseract, if
| it can't get OCRing a screenshot right, what _can_ it get
| right? It 's not like "I used" is such a rare phrase either,
| but it replaced the I with a pipe.
| 0x38B wrote:
| I OCRed an unprocessed screenshot from the chapter's table
| of contents (1), which gave me (2). The collated table of
| contents (3) was error free, but as your example shows,
| this OCR isn't good enough to not need checking and proof-
| reading.
|
| 1: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/vogue-sewing-11-toc-
| screens...
|
| 2: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/tesseract-ocr-
| output.png
|
| 3: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/vogue-toc.txt
| llm_trw wrote:
| >if it can't get OCRing a screenshot right, what can it get
| right?
|
| Book scans which is what it was designed for.
|
| If you read the fine manual you would see that they suggest
| the _minimum_ resolution to run it over is an x-height of
| 20 pixels, screens have seldom have one higher than 10
| pixels. With those settings I got the following out of OPs
| comment: I've been really impressed with
| Tesseract - I used it last month to add invisible OCR text
| (1) to scanned PDFs I reference a lot. My scans are
| quite good, but I was still impressed with the accuracy.
| I also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation
| setting (2) in the terminal until I got output I could copy
| & paste to adda navigable table of contents.
| 1: with the help of https://github.com/ocrmypdt/OCRmyPDF
| 2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-
| Usage.h..., " Using different Page Segmentation Modes"
| jahewson wrote:
| Tesseract was originally created by HP, open-sourced, and later
| developed by Google. It's based on techniques from the 1980s
| and is pretty underwhelming. But at least it's free!
| criddell wrote:
| When I read somebody praising Tesseract I always wonder how
| their experience could be so different from mine. It's so
| much worse than what you can do with a modern phone.
| WhatsName wrote:
| What is currently state-of-the-art when it comes to detetcting
| handwriting from photos?
|
| Tracing strokes is nice but I would be more interested in
| converting my handtaken notes to markdown.
| thimabi wrote:
| I don't know if they are the state-of-the-art, but handwriting
| recognition in iOS and ChatGPT do wonders for me -- even with
| an ugly handwriting. Though these are more like 90% to 95%
| accurate, you should review the output before trusting it.
| burnished wrote:
| Its pretty remarkable. I've used my phone to take pictures of
| stickers with model information that I couldn't otherwise
| reach and was able to copy the text from it. Really wild
| stuff.
| markvdb wrote:
| I'm looking for something like that, but free/open source and
| offline. Suggestions welcome!
| moatmoat wrote:
| such an exciting research project! I can imagine the impact this
| could have on education, e.g. handwriting notes of teachers in
| digital copies; or even preserve old documents in their digital
| counterpart
| no-reply wrote:
| This is very interesting. I had this idea of imitating human
| handwriting in my bucket of todos for machine learning models,
| but never got to it. I guess we aren't far from it.
| thimabi wrote:
| From the title, I naively assumed this article would be about
| people relearning to make legible/beautiful handwritten notes
| after losing this ability. That is something I'm currently
| struggling with after many years of too much typing and not as
| much handwriting.
|
| Google's actual research does help people like me, by making our
| notes less awful digitally. But I'd love not to be dependent on
| tech innovations to make my handwriting better.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Study comic lettering. Not saying it's the most efficient way
| of writing, but the process will teach you to think in terms of
| strokes and consistency. You can easily develop your own style
| from there.
| al_borland wrote:
| If you're serious about this, I've stumbled into areas of
| YouTube with people dedicated to this. Pick a font of how you
| want your writing to look, and practice, practice, practice.
| People make available (and sell) special lined sheets to get
| the height of various things right or help to guide the writer
| to the perfect slant.
|
| You just have to have the time and interest to do the work,
| much like you probably did when first learning to write.
| thimabi wrote:
| How do you recommend that practice to be like? Simply trying
| over and over to perfect each letterform on empty lined
| sheets, based on a reference?
|
| I've done a few handwriting workbooks, mostly consisting of
| block letter templates to fill. But each of them is
| incomplete on its own, and they don't even share the same
| font, making it much harder to practice.
| dbtc wrote:
| Also check out the resources on the r/handwriting subreddit.
| prabhu-yu wrote:
| Good idea. May you please share youtube link you are
| referencing?
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I'm also curious about the special sheets. Maybe I would be
| able to write legibly for once in my life :D
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| This has been mentioned somewhere else in the comment thread,
| but if you want to improve your handwriting, a good way is to
| use a fountain pen.
|
| My handwriting is immensely better with a fountain pen than
| with ballpoint or gel pens; I suppose partly because the
| fountain pen forces you to an optimal position and angle (it's
| much more inflexible about that, you can't just push it against
| the paper in any angle and expect it to write), and partly
| because it provides a smoother experience and feedback.
|
| You don't need to go overboard, the typical EUR20-ish Pilot
| Metro with medium nib or similar is more than enough.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I suggested Kate Gladstone's Handwriting Repair site
| elsethread:
|
| https://handwritingrepair.info/
|
| or see:
|
| https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books
|
| or John Howard Benson's lovely _The First Writing Book:
| Arrighi's Operina_ or Carolyn Knudsen's lovely _An Italic
| Calligraphy Handbook_ (which is much better than the modest
| title implies) and get a chisel edge marker or fountain pen.
| fatbird wrote:
| I noticed my handwriting was terrible, and consciously improved
| it by writing slower and being more mindful of writing neatly.
| A fountain pen helped me slow down, but fundamentally it was
| just a matter of slowing down and consciously forming nicer
| characters until it became easy to do so, at which point my
| speed increased--but I retained the habit of paying enough
| attention to make nice characters.
|
| Deliberate practice (as in worksheets or exercises) is less
| important than just going as slow as you need to, to make the
| characters correctly, until your muscle memory builds up and
| brings back the speed.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Can I just get good OCR for handwritten text? The last model that
| claimed to be "the best" was atrocious, only worked on PDFs of
| papers. ChatGPT is pretty decent but I was hoping for an offline,
| tailored solution
| anu7df wrote:
| Check out textify on appstore. I have found the accuracy to be
| great even for my terrible hand written text.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Now I'm wondering if they can use a similar architecture to
| derender paintings. It would the quite something to have a stroke
| perfect recreation of the Mona Lisa drawn by a modified pen
| plotter.
| MacTea wrote:
| Rings a bell: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03798
| jheriko wrote:
| seems overkill... for a bunch of reasons tbh. I guess the golden
| sledgehammer is just too tempting.
|
| taking photos of notes is a weird compromise that nobody really
| wants... we need better tools not better post processing
| anu7df wrote:
| I don't think this is a hypothetical use case, at least for me.
| I like writing on paper with a fountain pen. But would like a
| digital version of the notes that are searchable. Reasonable
| ocr exists for conversion to text, but this would may be give
| slightly more accurate results.
| Evidlo wrote:
| Can this work on low-power devices like note-taking tablets?
| Legend2440 wrote:
| You may be able to run it on an iPad, but probably not a
| Kindle.
|
| But also, the point of this is to convert photos of text into
| pen strokes. A note-taking tablet doesn't need it because it
| already has the pen strokes you wrote.
| Pamar wrote:
| Eric Hebborn (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hebborn) wrote
| "Italico per Italiani" (available in Italian only, alas
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Italico-italiani-moderno-trattato-c...)
| as a textbook/manual to improve day-to-day, practical
| calligraphy. Maybe there is something similar in other languages
| too...
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I recently purchased a small refrigerator whiteboard and it's
| been really amazing with the combination of my iPhone's ability
| to take a picture of my handwriting (script or cursive) and
| copy/pasta into a text. It's not always perfect (nor is my
| handwriting!) but it's good enough to just replace a character or
| two and hit send.
|
| This really tickles a bunch of things for me:
|
| 1) I am not sending a whole image (it's efficient)
|
| 2) I don't have to type/swipe at all (I'm not looking at a
| screen)
|
| 3) My s/o has easy access to the list at all times (it's not in a
| cloud)
|
| 4) It requires no power to update/maintain (markers last a long
| time)
|
| 5) It just feels so natural to grab a marker and write on the
| fridge when I exhaust something in that same fridge.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| This is a nifty idea. I bet there'll be a HN-correlated pop in
| fridge whiteboard sales from this.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Tbh my handwriting is write only. Through decades of computer use
| it has deteriorated to the point were it is illegible even to
| myself.
|
| Still. I will always be notetaking (and doodling) during meetings
| as it helps me order my thoughts.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Same. Over 20 years (note taking especially) it is reduced to
| scribbles. The value of it is the time thinking while writing
| it mostly, though todo's are longer lived.
| dr_sausages wrote:
| If your todo list is, or needs to be long lived, I think you
| might have more problems :D
|
| I make notes on paper as the act of writing makes it stick
| about in my head longer than it would if I typed typing them
| out; though similar to you there's better penmanship from a
| spider that fell in ink.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Long lived may be tomorrow/a few days :-) And struck
| through. And written at any angle on the paper. Definitely
| not a codified method for me.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I learned 10 finger typing when I was 8 in school (42 years
| ago), and have been glued to computer since then ; if I write
| something, or even sign something, it is complete gibberish,
| even to myself. To me it looks like those last stages of
| dementia scribbling, but I know that's not it because it was
| like this since I was 12 or so; my teachers couldn't read my
| writing and it affected my grades.
| sneak wrote:
| I'm the same way, and between that and the fact that I can
| type 120+wpm, makes me angry every time someone expects me to
| write something. Making dirt smudges on dried tree pulp is as
| archaic and outmoded as carving marks into bones, and in my
| view has no place in modern society outside of art.
| Woeps wrote:
| > in my view has no place in modern society outside of art.
|
| For a lot of use cases I agree, but no place is to ...
| abrupt in my opinion. Computers for sure have a multiplier
| affect in many cases. But when you really want to think
| something trough it's advised to slow down. For those cases
| paper and pen is the perfect medium.
|
| And I have a personal preference when making notes with pen
| and paper about hikes and climbs I'm working on/doing. But
| that's just me
| JadeNB wrote:
| > But when you really want to think something trough it's
| advised to slow down. For those cases paper and pen is
| the perfect medium.
|
| Or chalk on blackboard/marker on whiteboard. A marvelous
| way to get thoughts flowing that just don't seem to
| otherwise.
| markisus wrote:
| I'm pretty sure most modern mathematics research takes
| place on pencil and paper or chalkboard. It's too tedious
| to typeset everything in the research phase. It's also way
| harder to draw little diagrams or new invented notations on
| the computer.
| cubefox wrote:
| If mathematics was as young as programming, it wouldn't
| use any fancy symbols and make everything ASCII
| compatible. Though that wouldn't solve diagrams...
| eleveriven wrote:
| Funny how it almost becomes its own language, legible only to
| the subconscious
| blensor wrote:
| Same goes for my signature, I almost get anxious when I have
| to sign something on paper.
| cubefox wrote:
| No worries, signatures are expected to illegible scribbles.
| Writingdorky wrote:
| I like this 'my handwriting is write only'.
|
| when i was 18, i looked at notes from my new coworker / manager
| and asked him how he learned to write that nice. He told me
| that he struggled writing cursive and just started writing
| letter by letter (print letter style?).
|
| I changed my 'font' on that day and suddenly i was at least
| able to read what i wrote!
| albert_e wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| We grew up learning to write separate letters.
|
| Cursive was taught only very briefly as a way of telling us
| tgis also exists but don't bother too much about it.
| soco wrote:
| Nevertheless, cursive is where the speed is. University
| times I was writing at the speed of the professor chatting
| and still having it halfway readable even for others - even
| though the looks of it were tending to the Arabic (I'm
| Latin). Good times, now I can barely scratch a shopping
| list before I break my wrist.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Same here. And not only that, years of keyboard and mouse usage
| have done some damage to my wrists and nerves and it's actually
| painful for me to write.
| soco wrote:
| I believe that pain comes from misplaced expectations. We
| remember the times when we were fluent writing, or see it in
| others, and expect our hand to follow the same pattern with
| the same speed. So we push too hard. We should realize
| instead our hands must re-learn to write at this time,
| drawing the letters so slow like the small children do.
| blitzar wrote:
| Still. I will always be notetaking (and doodling) during
| meetings as it helps me not fall asleep and makes it look like
| I am paying attention.
| pratibha_simone wrote:
| Same here.
| artemonster wrote:
| Use boox or remarkable! You get both advantages of having the
| writing experience and their automatic recognition turns your
| scribbles into text!
| eleveriven wrote:
| Decades of typing, and now my handwriting is more of a cryptic
| art form than anything readable
| Neonlicht wrote:
| Even my mother who is 68 has severely deteriorated
| handwriting. Nobody writes by hand in a Western country since
| the smartphone.
| cubefox wrote:
| It's interesting that for decades, technologists were
| stubbornly predicting that the paperless office was just
| around the corner:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperless_office
|
| These predictions were famously overoptimistic.
| Paradoxically, paper consumption went up for a long time
| instead, because printers became cheaper or better, and
| wysiwyg word processors made it far easier than type
| writers to produce complex documents, with pictures and
| diagrams and tables.
|
| But approximately since the smartphone era, printer usage
| indeed seems in sharp decline. The paperless office, at
| last, became reality. Just a few decades later than
| expected.
| bluGill wrote:
| If I could get a digital music stand that worked well and
| wasn't expensive I'd get rid of a lot of my print. (I
| need one for the piano, one for the keyboard, one for
| each kid into music, so cost is very important!)
| globular-toast wrote:
| So you can't explain something to people on a whiteboard? I've
| been typing since I was a child but I'm still perfectly able to
| write legibly. If I thought my handwriting was that bad I would
| try to fix it as not being able to whiteboard would be
| terrible.
| viraptor wrote:
| Many of us don't do physical whiteboards anymore. I diagram a
| lot, but all of it is online. Apart from own satisfaction,
| there's no reason for me to get better handwriting. (And
| there lots of things more satisfying than that) Addressing a
| letter once a year without a printed label, I can use block
| letters.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Try Kate Gladstone's "Handwriting Repair" course:
|
| https://handwritingrepair.info/
|
| the biggest thing which helped my handwriting was switching
| away from ball points to either felt tips or fountain pens.
|
| Getting a Newton Messagepad also helped markedly, and since
| then I've been using tablets w/ Wacom EMR styluses where
| possible (NCR-3125 running PenPoint (donated to the Smithsonian
| by the guy who bought it) through a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro
| 360) and applications such as Nebo or Write by Stylus Labs.
| criddell wrote:
| You can fix it if you want to.
|
| By the time I graduated from school, my handwriting was pretty
| bad. I could read it, but nobody else really could. Then I got
| a Palm Pilot and it's primitive handwriting recognition forced
| me to slow down and make better letter forms. At the same time
| I devoted a little effort to improve my cursive as well.
|
| It's stuck with me and my handwriting is still fairly easy to
| read. My block caps look like something off an architectural
| drawing thanks to Palm's Graffiti system beating me up nearly
| 30 years ago.
| aiisahik wrote:
| Can it read the scribble of my doctor? If so this is
| groundbreaking in the medical data entry space.
| bobnamob wrote:
| The number of deaths attributable to misread treatment orders
| in hospitals is staggering.
|
| I'd be very careful about sticking another layer of
| interpretation between doctor and treating nurse.
|
| It's unfortunate med school doesn't teach block lettering like
| they used to teach to draftsmen/women.
| sneak wrote:
| Entering this sort of data correctly should be on the doctor.
| McDonald's digital order style giant pancake buttons with
| huge touch targets with wide margins and large type on a huge
| touchscreen should solve the boomer objections.
|
| Alternately, make it an app for the huge iPad Pro to solve
| the same problems. Make it as hard to fuck up as a fast food
| order. Disambiguation of input commands is a solved problem.
|
| There isn't really the will. Stupid windows apps with
| standard windows UI dropdowns that confuse and frustrate
| people not well versed with computer UI, running on standard
| low contrast small type displays with standard keyboard and
| mouse input, running on laggy RDP thin clients to
| underprovisioned workstation VMs in a data center is sadly
| the industry norm, and it still kills people.
| bradydjohnson wrote:
| Almost no medical school or hospital in the United States use
| paper or handwriting anymore. All orders are electronic.
| blitzar wrote:
| It says a lot that the illegible writing killed people yet
| appears to be affected by doctors in the same manner as a
| bimbo uses a vocal fry affectation.
|
| Glad to see my scripts from the doctor these days are typed
| not written.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| "Vocal fry" is a term some people made up to sound fancy.
| Actual linguists call it what it is: creaky voice. And they
| don't denigrate it. Men do it just as much as women, and
| there is (of course) no correlation with intelligence.
|
| It is a very lazy stereotype, and (of course) completely
| wrong, to associate "vocal fry" with "bimbos".
| nxobject wrote:
| As a lay reader, it's fascinating to see how much oomph we're
| getting out of LLMs on non-language-related tasks by figuring out
| clever encodings/linearizations.
| brainzap wrote:
| It was a scary moment when Apple Notes corrected my writing in my
| own hand writing.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| finally, I will be able to read my doctor's prescriptions.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I still look forward to have programming environments on tablets
| that are able to use pen input, instead of forcing us to carry a
| bluetooth keyboard.
|
| Apparently not something that anyone cares as business
| opportunity, because most likely most folks wouldn't pay for it,
| sadly.
| another-dave wrote:
| I'm definitely faster at typing than writing though --
| especially so when it comes to something like code that often
| requires in-place editing, shuffling statements around etc.
|
| I do like to work with paper & pen but moreso for ideation,
| diagramming, or todo lists rather than more "structured"
| inputs.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Naturally the idea is to explore new concepts a mix of
| diagrams and coding,
|
| Basically what Brett Victor in recent times, and others have
| been trying to do for decades,
|
| "Grail on Rand Tablet from 1968 demo"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cq8S3jzJiQ
|
| Or "Programmable Ink" at Strange Loop 2022,
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifYuvgXZ108
|
| There used to exist a graphical based Lisp for iPad, Lisping,
| unfortunely the app is long gone as it wasn't kept up to date
| with the OS.
|
| Here is on old thread discussing it,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802131
|
| The new iPad Calculator, is a more recent example of such
| ideas.
| Vampiero wrote:
| Man that would be horrible UX, I wouldn't pay for that. I'd
| only use it if someone paid ME to do it
| pjmlp wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Can you touch draw 120 WPM?
| pjmlp wrote:
| No, nor do I care to type that fast.
|
| Have the secretary typewriter contests from the 1950's come
| back into fashion?
| sam29681749 wrote:
| They have in the form of monkeytype wpm scores. I think
| these are generally based on an a-z lower case test, so I
| doubt it's a realistic indicator of someone's actual typing
| speed.
| sam29681749 wrote:
| I can't imagine people code at an equivalent to 120wpm.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| i still write notes daily and already this year have finished 4
| notebooks...however, things i need to review are typed, i write
| to keep things in my mind as they are being discussed...example,
| if i encountered an error while reviewing a program execution i
| would write it down "encountered error during attempt to do x"
| but i would also type it in my notes in vastly more detail with
| screenshots and other points...handwriting to me is almost like
| tagging it in my mind so i just don't forget that it happened.
| scrivanodev wrote:
| Very interesting experiment. I've been working on a handwriting
| application [0] for the past couple of years and incorporating
| the ability to take a picture to convert it into digital ink
| would be really nice.
|
| [0] https://scrivanolabs.github.io
| fredgrott wrote:
| Its not the writing PART!
|
| It is the non automation part!
|
| The experiment you can do to verify my point:
|
| 1. Write code by hand in plain text editor.....
|
| What you notice....programming syntax and knowledge becomes
| easier to retain and re-learn.
|
| No joke I do this several times a week.
| albert_e wrote:
| Can we replace / augment the keyboard with a white (or marked)
| paper to write on ... that is in view of a camera that has real
| time OCR
|
| Feels like it will be a good addition to input devices
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I'm wondering how well it would work with my crappy writing and
| the fact I write some letters revere from normal
| vintermann wrote:
| A model that could turn "offline" handwriting (the ink on the
| page) into "online" (order and timing of the strokes) I think
| could be really useful for a historical HTR pipeline... but
| ultimately, we need end to end.
|
| Why is historical HTR so neglected in all multi-task model
| evaluation benchmarks? There are millions of un-indexed
| handwritten historical documents which could give us a so much
| better understanding of our recent past. For that matter, it
| could give _models_ much better understanding of our recent past.
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