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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I take notes in a $.79 spiral paper notebook. When it fills up, I just scan it and get another one.

Can you recommend a quick, easy method for scanning all the pages?

I like paper notebooks, too. Someday, I'd like to have an app that would let me turn any ordinary stack of scratch paper or notebook into a searchable PDF in under 5 minutes. I would finish a notebook and just put my phone on a gooseneck stand and turn the pages one at a time (not riffle) at one page per second or two, and it would know when to take the photos, which it would flatten, orient, and bind into a PDF of the notebook. It would maintain my handwritten pages but add an OCR'ed backstore of the text that could be used to create something like a table of contents, an index, and a fulltext search.

I imagine some portion of that is already available, and the rest will be arriving anytime now.

> Can you recommend a quick, easy method for scanning all the pages?

The trick is to use a hopper fed scanner that scans both sides at the same time. Not a flat bed scanner.

I use an old Fujitsu fi-5120C scanner.

I haven't found an OCR yet that will decipher handwriting. I would think that with all the advances in AI this would be an easy problem.

I think the technology has already been around for a while, but probably not big enough of a market for desktop usage. On my iPad as an example, Notability, GoodNotes, and OneNote (and possibly on desktop versions as well) are able to perform handwriting recognition and text conversion

Handwriting recognition when you can watch the person write (stroke order and timing) is actually a very different problem from recognizing handwriting from an image without that data, which is much harder. Though these days statistical learning techniques similar to those used in machine translation are getting pretty darn good at it.

I use different methods, but the most important one is an old Fujitsu Snapscan automatic feeder scanner that scans pages by both sides at the same time.

I bought that in order to OCR books(destroying them cutting them with a rotary disk saw) long time ago but I use it today for digitalizing all my notes.

If you don't care about destroying your notebooks, it is the best solution. I did that with my University notebooks because I needed to access them in work after University and travel a lot so I don't want the bulkiness of carrying around 20 kilos.

No need to flatten, orient, color correct anything, tens of pages per minute.

Because of the scanner for my own notes I use single sheets of paper and high quality aluminum clipboards and Staedtler 432 M color pens that last for more than a year or intense work. Way cheaper than a tablet with stylus.

I digitalize old books today that need special care and could not be destroyed, archival material like diaries from wars. For that I use an array of cameras and a projector and sophisticated software to flatten it. But that is expensive and needs lots of work.

If you are interested on that, just google DIY book scanner, but I recommend the automatic feeder scanner if you can.

I used to mess around with a flat-bed scanner (autofeed would be easier) but my current system is simple but quick.

I use my Canon camera: Click click, flip page, repeat. Copy to laptop, batch resize & rename, drag into a folder.

No OCR, but it wouldn't pick up my shorthand anyway :)

Scanning sounds like a pain.

eInk tablets are the future and confer all the advantages of pen and paper. Perhaps they need to undergo a few more generations of UI improvement, and the eInk company itself needs to have its patents expire so the tech isn't held up, but the experience is real. It's tactile, vibrant, and smooth. Battery life is never an issue, even with wifi.

The advantages of having notes always with you and being able to organize into folders and move sheets and figures around beats paper a thousand times over. Highlighting a figure, dragging it to a better spot, rotating it to an affine angle to give it life, and then resizing it to double size is an earth shattering experience.

Erasing, also, is finally a first class experience in a way it can never be with paper. You can even re-sort lists of items with ease.

I'll never go back to pen and paper.

Erasing and dragging are enough to make my reMarkable worth it, but for random brainstorming I need real notebooks that I actually keep on hand. Never been sure why, something about having to physically locate my writing somewhere is huge for me.

I carry both a reMarkable and a Rocketbook with me -- the e-ink tablet makes taking notes super easy, but, the rocketbook is great for sketching and coming up with arch drawings and the like.

I can quickly turn the RocketBook sketches into pdfs and send them to the reMarkable for further processing...but, I love the flexibility between the two, and honestly, the reMarkable fits in the pocket off my RocketBook...so it's not difficult to carry both.

The more that I use reMarkable, the more I fall in love with it, but, I wish I could find a way to make my own templates.

Did a search for Rocketbook and found this. Just wanted to plug it in here, not paid or anything.

I'm taking a college cryptography class, and I started by maintaining notes with LaTeX in Markdown. It didn't help much. The moment I started using a Rocketbook was when I would get things. I've reused my book about 5 times now in conjunction with work and other classes. I'm on my sixth cycle and love it!

I'm confused about rocketbook, why would you want to reuse notebooks? Paper notebooks are cheap enough to be disposable

I prefer to minimize the waste I generate with my daily activities. A reusable notebook sounds ideal for me. I don't use paper for this very reason.

Some reasons off the top of my head:

* I can scribble group meeting notes and share them in Slack by just scanning from my phone and they come out great—including drawings

* I can scan my notes quickly as PDFs and keep them for years to come

* Some classes allow me to upload and refer to my notes during exams

* I don't waste any paper

Points 1,2,3 apply to paper notebooks, too.

As for wasting paper, even in my furious note taking days in college, it didn't amount to that much paper. I don't think the stack after graduating reached a foot high. You'll waste orders of magnitude more paper throwing away junk mail, food packages, etc. Besides, paper recycles easily. Plastic rocketbook pages, nope.

They do, but the accompanying app with RocketBook makes it easier. Each page has customizable bubbles which I can tick off to send the notes to the right destination. It just works which is unusual with most technology.

Additionally, when I was in my undergrad I still went through a lot of paper. I have bad habits when I scribble notes or solve math problems. But with this, it's the only notebook I carry.

I don't have separate notebooks for work, subjects, home, etc.

You can definitely make your own templates. The link I shared above has links to the tool I use for this (https://github.com/moovida/remarkable-hyutilities)

If it works for you, great. I've looked at those, and was put off by the price, poor contrast, no color, and fragility of the machine.

If I need to take notes with me, I'll just snap a photo of it with my phone.

My notebook pages are often stained with coffee, and maybe a bit of jam and butter :-) I don't worry about spilling coffee on it, setting a hot mug on it, setting something heavy on it, throwing it in the back of my car. I don't worry about cleaning it (I once ruined an ipod by trying to clean goop off it with an alcohol swab).

Or maybe I'm just old and Led Zeppelin is still my favorite band.

(Scanning a hundred pages or so takes just a few minutes.)

Just imagining trying to “flip” through a notebook of e-ink pages notes puts me off immediately. Doing so in a kindle, or even a PDF on my computer, is unpleasant. Have they a solution to this in the e-ink notebook?

> he eInk company itself needs to have its patents expire so the tech isn't held up,

Citation needed. Really. Please read my past comments. The speed of electrophoresis is held back by physics. Not patents. If you know of even a theoretical way to achieve stable ink particle position with fast moving ink particles then please link to your publication or research work because it would revolutionize numerous industries, not just displays. Thanks.

Absolutely. I did the same for a long time. I work with a bunch of companies every year, and having notes organized by client has been really helpful. That and a nice workflow to send notes/sketches/ideas from the notebook to a client via email is pretty nice. But definitely not for everybody.

Likewise, but I don't bother scanning it. I just throw it away and get another one off the pile. If it's important I'll transcribe it in the moment, but it's almost never that important.

When I was in college, I'd write code in spiral notebooks (didn't have screen editors then). It's amusing to me to see those today.

What about organizing different topics? I like the remarkable because it's like an infinite subject notebook. E.g. I can take notes in a separate notebook for each book I read and can easily refer back to old notes on other books.

I just get another notebook. For example, I have a separate notebook for my Dodge (it's been extensively customized). In college, one notebook per class worked out nicely.

For work notes, I index by topic - not too difficult, those don't grow all that fast and finding a few minutes here and there to update the index is not hard. Page numbers increase monotonically across volumes, so cross-volume references by page number work okay; each volume's index covers only its own topics, but that hasn't been a problem so far since needing to refer across volumes is rare except around when one ends and another starts.

For personal notes, I keep those in the same series of volumes as my diary, which I have not yet indexed. I have a very general system of colored tape flags for stuff like "essay ideas", "story ideas", etc., but nothing more specific than that.

I began this diary in 2018; it's now around 1150 pages and about to enter volume 7, and the lack of detailed indexing is beginning to be a problem. For longer-running works, it is not rare to have substantive notes across three or four volumes.

I've started looking for a workable method of maintaining an index by hand across so large a body of content, but haven't found anything that looks good so far - in particular, I don't yet know how to overcome the issue that a handwritten index can't feasibly be reordered to alphabetize or for any other reason. I'd dearly love to hear whatever experience-based suggestions anyone might care to make here!

Single subject notebooks got me through college.

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