Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

I'm an ambidextrous and writing by hand tends to be a tedious experience for me. Where many in this thread are enthusiasts or writing professionals, I rather want to convey a more utilitarian mindset. My goals are to have people understand what I write and not be in pain. For whatever reason, ballpoint pens and I can't mix with legibility. I believe it's the pressure and dragging that kills it for me. Pencil is also not great when writing with my left (because it smudges, using a #2.5 pencil helps a bit, but then I'm using more pressure to get the lines dark).

I found I could write much more legibly using a fountain pen, so I've been using them since 1st or 2nd grade. There's a ton of drawbacks to using fountain pens for everything daily. First, while rare, I'd still get leaks and ink on my hands. For instance, if I dropped the pen. Second, there's a bit of a maintenance burden on fountain pens, the nibs need to be cleaned from time to time. Finally, pretty much all of these inks will wash out if the paper gets wet, so it's super bad for legal documents. I like the Pilot Metropolitan fountain pens as they strike the right balance of affordability and quality. The Fine nib for me (correlates to EF from American/European companies) seems to be the sweet spot, Medium feels imprecise for me. Noodler ink seems great, I was previously using Schaeffer ink and it was just ok.

The latest pens I've come enjoy using are Pilot's Frixxion line. I grabbed on a whim awhile back and feel like every student of mathematics should know of these pens. They are a gel pen with fine point options but they can be 'erased' by rubbing a plastic nub on the back against paper. This heats up the paper and causes the ink to disappear. The effect can be reversed by throwing the paper in the freezer if erasure was unintended (or if a notebook was left in an extremely hot cat). I wish I had known about these pens when I was in school. Gel-type pens seem a bit more practical than fountain for daily carry or occasional use, not as good as a fountain but the ink seems to flow better than ballpoint and the tips don't get messed up like a felt pen.

EDIT: More on topic though, I have tried rollerball pens and did not like them. They seemed even less precise than ballpoints for me and skipped more. Terrible writing experience all around, would not do again.

Many Noodler's inks are waterproof and have served me well even for legal docs.

I've even found a bunch of other inks that aren't advertised as waterproof/resistant that ended up to be waterproof depending on the paper. For example J. Herbin Perle Noire on meh paper.

I do fine with them as an everyday carry, my gripe is mainly when I get a new pen, paper or ink knowing that a paper might not like a certain pen or ink.

If you get your hands on it:

Rohrer & Klingner dokumentus or sketch-ink

First one is certified document proof, the others work the same, just that the used pigments are not as hardened against chemicals to allow strict iso certification.

They are both fast at drying and once dry, won't give a inch to water. Not even coloring the water and marking the rest of the paper, where it flowed.

I'd love to hear more about your experiences. I too am not a writing-inclined person (and prefer to do most of my notetaking digitally for that reason), and would love anything that makes the process more frictionless. Most of my writing tends to be of a mathematical nature, other than the more mundane tasks of signing legal documents.

This is difficult to approach. It's not so much that I don't like handwriting so much that it's something I have a great difficulty performing.

My background in handwriting starts in kindergarten when my teacher had me pick my right hand after I couldn't decide which hand I preferred to grip with (they had these little triangular rubber grip guides for the hands). A year or two later I would switch to my left when my right would cramp, as this hand learned whatever the right did just as easily.

There are many submissions on HN about neurodiversity, the way people think differently. I suspect that for the majority of the population, once they learn to write it's similar to walking: A largely automatic activity that doesn't require a huge amount of concentration to do. That's not been the case for me, maybe it's less brain lateralization, I don't know. I've begun to think more about it in recent years after a friend was diagnosed with ADHD a few years back. He is also someone with mixed-handedness and poor legibility. For him, being put on stimulant medication caused a dramatic improvement in his writing legibility. More recently, After I was no longer able to retain a secretary for note-taking in meetings I inquired about and received the same diagnosis. Stimulant medication has the same effect on me, for the first time in my life I can write legibly (if still slowly). I have no idea if this sort of medical approach would have helped my writing speeds if received while younger.

What I'm trying to convey is that I don't dislike writing, I just wasn't gifted with the physical ability to do it effectively. In the same sense, I might have also liked art courses if I could actually draw basic shapes without a ruler and compass.

In a discussion of pens, I feel that fountain pens can greatly help a person that might otherwise have difficulty penning in steady lines. It did for me at least. Keyboards have been even better. I can type so far above what I can write that writing is only left for my private notes, letters, and necessary legal documents like checks and tax stuff. I feel technology intervention in school would have been more helpful than providing better/alternative writing utensils and/or medicine but I was going through school before the schools were ready to provide it.

Thanks for that perspective. I too have fought with ADHD tendencies my whole life and have also had similar issues with art and penmanship, and switched to digital notes as early as possible for these reasons, but find myself needing more actual pen and paper as I do more architecture work. Thanks for opening my eyes to something I thought was always closed to me.

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