Journaling Just Works

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A place to discuss anything related to keeping a journal, a diary, a planner, a bullet journal, art/junk journal. Productivity, self-help, mindfulness, memory-keeping, creativity, project management or any other purpose.

Paper and digital alike.

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Want to digitalize my journal (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello, I am keeping a journal in handwritten form for several years now. From the beginning I used acid free paper and archival ink so that the pages will be readable for a few decades. However I am thinking about keeping a digital backup of everything for several months now. Reason for that is that in case of a fire I'd loose all my memories. So it is important to me to keep this information in a separate place.

Now I could go the easy way and could just scan all pages and save them, but this would just be a regular backup. So I was reading about OCR that is being used by many software solutions to recognize text and make pictures or scans searchable. However this is good only for digital text and not meant for handwriting.

Now Apple shows that recognizing handwriting is possible, because my iPad learns from my handwriting in notes and can convert digital text to look exactly like my handwriting. I can make a picture of handwritten text, too, and can then select that text in the photos app. So this shows me that there is indeed a solution that can recognize my handwriting.

So does anyone here know how I could achieve this in my case so that I have a digital backup of my written journals and make all of this searchable? I am fine with technical solutions like python scripts or self-hosting something, as long as it makes my goal possible.

Thank you in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Some scanners I've used at my library have had OCR but I doubt there was handwriting capability. Still it may be worth a shot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I've seen this around as a self host solution for backing up stuff but not sure about handwriting, maybe there are plugins.
https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Yes, Paperless is awesome for backing up documents, but unfortunately it’s also not good at recognising handwriting as it uses standard OCR. Awesome software for everything else though! I actually use it daily.