Computer Act!ve - UK (2022-06-08)

14 pages of easy-to-follow workshops and expert tips

Workshops & Tips

HOW TO...

3535

PLUS

Convert handwriting

on your phone

Now on version 5, Prizmo 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 http://www.snipca.com/41977,

although handwriting recognition

requires a payment. There are two plans

to choose from: ‘small’ and ‘large’. The

small plan lets you save 50 examples of

your handwriting online and costs 99p

a month or £9.99 a year. The large plan

increases this to 500, and costs £4.99 a

month or £49.99 a year.

We tested it by writing out the opening

lines of Pride and Prejudice (‘It is a truth

universally acknowledged, that a single

man in possession of a good fortune,

must be in want of a wife’). We wrote it

twice: once in our regular handwriting

(^1 in our screenshot) and again with

largely separated letters^2 to give the

software the best chance of recognition.

The results were pretty accurate in both

instances, with even our joined-up text

transcribed almost faultlessly.

But Prizmo isn’t the only option, so we

repeated our test with the Pen to Print

app. Again, this is free to download, for

both iOS (www.snipca.com/41969) and

Android (www.snipca.com/41970), with

in-app purchases enabling some key

features, like exporting recognised text.

Again, the results were good. It

made only very minor mistakes with

both our joined-up and non-joined

original. Where it did make a mistake,

it was usually at a point where we had

I

t 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.

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

Issue 633 • 8 – 21 June 2022

Pull Out

& Keep

Issue 633

44 Phone & Tablet Tips

46 Make Windows

Better

47 Make Office Better

48 In the Club: Make

charts that update

35 Convert handwriting to

digital text

38 Control your Android

phone from Windows

40 Readers’ Tips

42 Browser Tips:

Block online ads

without leaving spaces

Convert your handwriting

to digital text by Nik Rawlinson

Prizmo transcribed both our normal

(rather messy) handwriting (1) and

neater version (2)

1

2