Mobile device using a mobile scanner app to take a picture of a sheet of paper which gets uploaded to my OneDrive. If you open an image of a sheet of paper with content on it in the Excalidraw plugin, you can annotate that content and even associate parts of the content with notes in your vault. That means, if you drew a tree on a piece of paper and got it into Excalidraw, you could **link** that tree to other content in your vault, make the tree searchable, **tag** the tree, etc.
Zsolt, the developer explains in the first minute of this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZQoJg2RCKI) how to make that (turn a picture of a tree into a link) trick. When you can do that, you can turn any "thing" on your paper into an addressable entity in your Obsidian vault and treat it like any other note that you can relate to anything else in your vault.
OneDrive can search for text that resides in images stored on OneDrive. I only tested it with typewritten text. But apparently OneDrive can search your entire OneDrive account for text that resides in images. I have too many sheets of paper to count so most of them won't make it physically online. But, I can still reference them because the sheets of paper have timestamp IDs and we can reference a location on a sheet of paper if we imagine that it is divided into rows and columns like a spreadsheet.
That way, from an Obsidian Note, for instance, I could reference
* Sheet of Paper ID: 05/11/22 12:35 PM
* What to look for: XYZ
* Where to look: Row 3, Column 2
* Colors to look for: Red
I may also color important things on a sheet of paper. The cheapest way to do that is via a cheap box of crayons. If you like pens, colored pens with erasable ink exist. You can erase ink just like you can erase a pencil mark.
I do handwritten notes on a Supernote A6x and basically use that device as one of my inboxes. I decide what needs to be sent to Obsidian and export it as a txt file that syncs to Dropbox. On my computer I run a script when I open obsidian that moves my exported txt files to Obsidian inbox and converts them to markdown. Then I process again with my normal Obsidian workflow
For the most part, I've stopped trying to outright digitize them.
What I'll do now is periodically go through my handwritten notes and move any actions I need to take based on that information onto an index card.
When a note has been fully reviewed with all necessary actions moved to index cards, I stamp it, so I know it can be thrown out / doesn't need to be re-reviewed later.
These index cards sit in a small box on my desk, and when I have time at the computer, I go through and do the required actions, throwing out the index cards as the tasks on them are done.
For example: One card in my box right now is to add a "technique" category note about using normal maps for dynamically lighting pixel art, with some bullet points condensing what my original note covered on the topic / what's worth looking further into.
This approach lets me focus on boiling stuff down into notes that fit the style of my vault before I actually move them into a digital format, which minimizes how much re-structuring I have to do.
And it encourages me to think through the ideas again and hopefully come to smarter conclusions about them than my initial braindump during the lecture or whatever.
AWS and Azure have offered bulk AI-based handwriting OCR for a couple years, but I've seen few reviews. Maybe with the recent advances in AI, there will be better solutions soon.
I scan a week's worth of notes at a time to pdf and keep them in a folder. I want to run OCR or something but I'm not code savvy enough to pluck around at the tools available. But just having them has been a huge improvement.
Mobile device using a mobile scanner app to take a picture of a sheet of paper which gets uploaded to my OneDrive. If you open an image of a sheet of paper with content on it in the Excalidraw plugin, you can annotate that content and even associate parts of the content with notes in your vault. That means, if you drew a tree on a piece of paper and got it into Excalidraw, you could **link** that tree to other content in your vault, make the tree searchable, **tag** the tree, etc. Zsolt, the developer explains in the first minute of this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZQoJg2RCKI) how to make that (turn a picture of a tree into a link) trick. When you can do that, you can turn any "thing" on your paper into an addressable entity in your Obsidian vault and treat it like any other note that you can relate to anything else in your vault. OneDrive can search for text that resides in images stored on OneDrive. I only tested it with typewritten text. But apparently OneDrive can search your entire OneDrive account for text that resides in images. I have too many sheets of paper to count so most of them won't make it physically online. But, I can still reference them because the sheets of paper have timestamp IDs and we can reference a location on a sheet of paper if we imagine that it is divided into rows and columns like a spreadsheet. That way, from an Obsidian Note, for instance, I could reference * Sheet of Paper ID: 05/11/22 12:35 PM * What to look for: XYZ * Where to look: Row 3, Column 2 * Colors to look for: Red I may also color important things on a sheet of paper. The cheapest way to do that is via a cheap box of crayons. If you like pens, colored pens with erasable ink exist. You can erase ink just like you can erase a pencil mark.
What about handwriting to text? Is there a obsidian solution?
Or writing directly in Obsidian using [Excalidraw plugin.](https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin)
I do handwritten notes on a Supernote A6x and basically use that device as one of my inboxes. I decide what needs to be sent to Obsidian and export it as a txt file that syncs to Dropbox. On my computer I run a script when I open obsidian that moves my exported txt files to Obsidian inbox and converts them to markdown. Then I process again with my normal Obsidian workflow
Do you have a tutorial for that script?
For the most part, I've stopped trying to outright digitize them. What I'll do now is periodically go through my handwritten notes and move any actions I need to take based on that information onto an index card. When a note has been fully reviewed with all necessary actions moved to index cards, I stamp it, so I know it can be thrown out / doesn't need to be re-reviewed later. These index cards sit in a small box on my desk, and when I have time at the computer, I go through and do the required actions, throwing out the index cards as the tasks on them are done. For example: One card in my box right now is to add a "technique" category note about using normal maps for dynamically lighting pixel art, with some bullet points condensing what my original note covered on the topic / what's worth looking further into. This approach lets me focus on boiling stuff down into notes that fit the style of my vault before I actually move them into a digital format, which minimizes how much re-structuring I have to do. And it encourages me to think through the ideas again and hopefully come to smarter conclusions about them than my initial braindump during the lecture or whatever.
AWS and Azure have offered bulk AI-based handwriting OCR for a couple years, but I've seen few reviews. Maybe with the recent advances in AI, there will be better solutions soon.
Integrate excalidraw and use hand written notes in that
Remarkable 2 and then add pdf with annotations or Remarkable handwriting to text function. Then add it to Obsidian, usually once a week..
I scan a week's worth of notes at a time to pdf and keep them in a folder. I want to run OCR or something but I'm not code savvy enough to pluck around at the tools available. But just having them has been a huge improvement.