Yes and no. If you turn on the OCR settings to your preferred language (in my case, Japanese), it will automatically convert your handwriting to text whenever you export, so the PDF will have the image layer with your handwriting, and underneath there will be a text layer that DT can search (when I write in a mix of English and Japanese, it does a pretty good job of OCR).
I would prefer, sometimes, to write on paper, scan, OCR, and then put that into DT (I’m old school that way, I guess). But, in my experience, the Apple Pencil + iPad Pro + GoodNotes combination consistently provides superior OCR results.
my setup & workflow:
- large iPad Pro
- Apple Pencil
- GoodNotes App -> every page is automatically backed-up as a PDF (as it looks like in GoodNotes, 1:1 copy of your handwriting) to Dropbox incl. OCR! - those files are indexed to DEVONthink Office Pro and then synced to DTTGo.
that works fine for me. I can tag the handwritten notes in DT, can group them, can search them, etc. The only thing I need is to regulary run DT on my Mac the get the Dropbox files and then sync them…
For the security-conscious, GoodNotes also has a handy setting that will allow you to exclude files / folders from the automatic Dropbox upload. This kind of attention to detail makes it worth the price, in my opinion.
Also, just for fun, you might want to “lasso” your text and give a try to the conversion. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found the app is usually able to convert all but a few letters into text for pasting into other apps (or you can leave the text right there in the note). I don’t use it all that much, but it is handy to have around.
In contrast, Nebo is a bit annoying, because it seems to be trying to convert my text as I go, and failing to recognize input while it processes the text. Turning off that setting means that I can convert everything into text, but I think I lose my original handwriting. There might be a way to export handwriting, but all I can get it to do is export the (often mistakenly) converted text. And, the deal-breaker for me is that it is not very enjoyable to write on, so even though it is free, I think it has a while to go before it will come close to matching GoodNotes.
I tried a jerry-rigged handwriting DTTG workflow just yesterday with poor results. (Note that I do not care about OCR, at least for now.)
I downloaded a lined paper template and made a 10-page pdf out of it. I then imported the blank lined paper pdf to DTPO, and synced to DTTG. During a meeting the next day I opened the pdf and started “annotating” it in DTTG on my iPad Pro w/Pencil.
It was working like a charm—my workflow completely in DevonThink!—until the annotations (my handwritten notes) started flickering and disappearing. I ultimately lost a combined two pages of annotations at random parts of the page. I’m guessing the annotations combined with my 10-page pdf was too much for DTTG to bear.
So for now, my workflow for handwritten notes will be to create a new file in Notability and then export it to DTTG as a flattened PDF when done. It’s kind of a digital recreation of a pen-and-paper notebook setup—since it’s too much work to start sorting the Notability files on the fly, notability just ends up being like one big continuous notebook.
I would definitely like to see a handwriting filetype in DTTG. It would allow me to have my entire workflow contained within DTTG/DTPO.
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This is definitely nothing that should happen. Do you still have that PDF, maybe, and could share it with me (eboehnisch(at)devontechnologies.com)?