hey guys, i'm going to tafe this year and i want something i can backup my handwritten notes with and then read them on my PC screen. i thought i could use a scanner to do this, but i'm not sure which one to get. how do those portable scanners work?
i'm thinking of either getting a scanner or a livescribe like this:
http://www.officeworks.com.au/retail/products/Technology/Ebo…
or
http://www.officeworks.com.au/retail/products/Technology/Ebo…
thanks
mmmm good idea i didn't even think of using a smartphone camera. what issues do the pen based approaches?
Any scanner will do. Don't get a handheld, it will drive you crazy. Livescribe is good but like any such devices there is a big learning / teaching it to read curve… plus the paper costs for them is very high (they use special "dotty" paper)
The main things are:
a) whether you want a document feeder (so auto-page loading)
b) whether you want to scan straight to PDF
c) whether you want USB or network connection.
One cheap and easy way may be to get a cheap mutifunction printer (<$50) with document feeder, but never use it to print anything (the ink costs are outrageous)
i agree, a self feeding multifunction would be a good idea. However be warned that some can be a piece of junk, so you should research online and find out if they can feed paper properly.
Otherwise a flatbed scanner is ok.
For assignments, i just take photos with the camera. 10MP is enough detail in an emergency (for the small amount of hand written assignments submitted).
Don't forget, you can print your own livescribe paper.
which is just as costly compared to writing on plain paper and scanning it.
you do realize livescribe offers more benefits than simply having a pdf version of your handwritten notes right?
Being able to listen to the lecture again at the very point you wrote down that specific note is a great feature.
@eug, no doubt you can do that, but I still don't see the point of livescribe.
imo, nothing beats preparing for the lecture before hand, and the notes you take are just confirmation of what you understood.
lectures, i don't think it's useful, but in a corporate environment, where 'someone' said 'something' and committed it, that's the useful part because he/she wouldn't weasel out of it.
having a 'special format' paper is annoying, i understand the need for the dependence due to the technology used, but personally I find it silly. I want to be able to write/draw on any paper I can grab, recycled printouts to a stack of new A4s. This limitation is just an annoyance for me.
I can't think why there would be any scanners that couldn't scan straight to PDF. Even if there were there is plenty of ghostscript based software that will add this feature for you if you have some knowledge of such things, but I've never seen one that couldn't do so out of the box.
i use Canon 600f Lide. It has a 35mm negative scanner adapter as a bonus.
Bought in 2006. Still working :)
Resisted the temptation to get those 100-in-1 scanner/printer/fax/coffeemakers…
Go figure.
You just need good OCR software
Personally I wouldn't even try to OCR handwriting, it is more effort than you will save by typing, unless you really struggle with typing.
try handiscan… i got this otek handiscan to use for uni, very good to use to scan all your work and transfer into computer easily. go look at their website http://www.wix.com/orzcustomer/orz-dgtal#!__scanner
that looks pretty cool too, but it's only $20 cheaper than the livescribe and the livescribe has audio recording.
a smartphone might be the best way to go because it'll have the built in camera plus i can record audio in it too.
Probably as easy to get one of those apps that uses a smartphone camera to capture a page of text and turn it into a PDF document.
Pen based approaches have issues and aren't as user friendly as they should be.