A return to hand-written notes by learning to read and write

https://research.google/blog/a-return-to-hand-written-notes-by-learning-to-read-write/

by mfiguiere • 2 years ago

595 181 2 years ago

This is very cool. Here is interesting application of something like this. My handwriting is pretty bad, and worse still when writing fast. When I am teaching, a lot of what I write is worse than I would like it to be.

I could teach a system like this my very slow neat handwriting. And then as I write on my whiteboard while teaching, it replaces my quick bad handwriting with the neater handwriting.

rnewme2• 2 years ago

Why not simply have a laser projector, keyboard and canvas textbox then?

elashri2• 2 years ago

From a quick visit to his profile (linked website), he is a physicist. This technology setup is very complicated and against the eternal usage of blackboard in a typical physics department. And to be honest this applies to his suggestion as well but you still at least get the feeling on writing on a board.

nine_k• 2 years ago

You also need the skill of lightning-fast LaTeX typing, and the skill of drawing and drafting with a speed comparable to that of a chalk. You need a canvas-driven tool for that, and your eyes would be on the screen for long periods of time, not contacting the audience.

Wowfunhappy2• 2 years ago

Wouldn't it make even more sense to replace your quick bad handwriting with perfect Helvetica?

recursive• 2 years ago

Hard to make boxes and arrows out of helvetica, and basically impossible to do it quickly

loginx• 2 years ago

I got a stylus for my iPad and i felt that way at the beginning but I learned that i visualize in my head what I'm going to create right before I draw, and the difference between what's in my mind vs what gets produced is so great, that it feels like a weird uncanny valley and i hate the output.

abdullahkhalids5• 2 years ago

There is (subjective) charm in handwritten text that is simply not present in digital fonts. I would rather keep that magic alive.

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

Not necessarily - your handwriting can sometimes be subtly optimized to the sort of subject matter you write about. For example, when I write lowercase T, I give it a little hook at the bottom. I also write my lowercase L in the cursive form, the tall skinny loop. That keeps similar-looking letters that I use a lot distinct. There must be other examples.

sam296817495• 2 years ago

When I'm taking notes, I use arrows, squiggly lines, symbols, I circle text, etc. which won't necessarily translate to typical text block.

sitkack• 2 years ago

If you draw your equations well enough, they can get converted into LaTex in realtime and then you could run them in a computational notebook.

Esp if you fuse the audio of you explaining the equations along with the LaTex it can correct for errors.

abdullahkhalids5• 2 years ago

What software can do this?

currymj• 2 years ago

apple notes on new iPadOS does this right now -- just cleans up your handwriting to be slightly neater but still look like you.

eleveriven4• 2 years ago

That's actually a brilliant feature! Without losing the "you"

egypturnash• 2 years ago

Or you could just find some lettering manuals and improve your handwriting. Practicing at a slow speed will improve your fast work, too.

znpy4• 2 years ago

My handwriting is pretty bad

i know it might sound dumb, but have you tried playing with a fountain pen?

The feedback is way different from a ballpoint pen and it also depends on paper and the kind of ink. It makes writing way less "predictable" and a bit more enjoyable.

a cheap one (5-15$) with a medium nib might be a good start... some people move on to collect fountain pens, but i do most on my (on paper) writing with a ~20$ Pelikan Jazz.

xarope2• 2 years ago

I've realized that when I use cheap pens on hotel stationery, my handwriting looks terrible, probably because the surfaces are too smooth? Other than fountain pens, are there other alternatives that give more tactile feedback?

komali2• 2 years ago

I write a lot with a fountain pen and if anything it made it harder to understand my handwriting... even the next day I'll have a hard time.

I've considered the "just learn to write better" approach and I've tried here and there but I've been handwriting journals for 28 years and I'm just not sure it's possible to write cleanly at the speed I handwrite at this point. Especially since it's in cursive.

sph3• 2 years ago

I know your comment is in earnest and I don't mean to make fun of you, but there is something so funny in our Americanised world where everything is reduced to "it's not you, you just need to buy the correct gizmo that will solve all your problems."

Fountain pens enthusiasts are like music gear or mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, that justify their hobby and believe spending on the next shiny thing is the key to fulfil their whatever, until the next shiny thing arrives.

The thing is... if one dislikes or doesn't care about writing that they have basically forgotten how to, it is not spending money on a fancy writing implement that is gonna turn them into a medieval monk scribe.

creesch• 2 years ago

Probably good advice if you are right handed and have good fine motor skills.

At least way into the 90s kids here learned to write with fountain pens. For me this meant pages full of smudges, forked pens and generally unreadable text.

As soon as I was allowed to switch to a regular pen my handwriting improved a lot (still not great, but better).

js8• 2 years ago

I think you don't even need to go to fountain pens. As a long time user of ballpoint pens, I recently started using gel pens and I wouldn't go back.

abdullahkhalids5• 2 years ago

You started a flame war. So let me just say that I exclusively use a fountain pen to write. That handwriting is a lot better. But when writing digitally for teaching or meetings, I use a wacom tablet. That is pretty bad for writing.

Propelloni3• 2 years ago

Improving your hand writing is not hard. For whiteboards start out with using block letters only. It will slow you down in the beginning but not for long.

That's one of the "game changing" hints I received during my time as a tutor at university. (One other was to always copy books from back to front; very useful but somewhat outdated now.)

shiroiushi• 2 years ago

One other was to always copy books from back to front; very useful but somewhat outdated now.

What's so useful about that?

chrismorgan• 2 years ago

For whiteboards start out with using block letters only. It will slow you down in the beginning but not for long.

I strongly dislike this advice. The slowing down is probably actually the feature here that works; as for the uppercase, it definitely hurts comprehension. Go lowercase, slow, and deliberately never joining any letters, for your beginning, and I think it will probably be better for all parties involved: reading and comprehension will be improved, you'll get at least as much improvement in your handwriting, probably more, and certainly in a more useful area.

bilekas2• 2 years ago

We present a model to convert photos of handwriting into a digital format that reproduces component pen strokes, without the need for specialized equipment.

Call my a cynic but this feels like a free way for Google to pull more data for training.

byte_0• 2 years ago

That’s exactly what I thought.

delduca• 2 years ago

No evil.

pkaye• 2 years ago

There is a repo with Apache license. Does that need to connect to Google services to use?

ipsum2• 2 years ago

Sure. You're wrong and a cynic. The model does not connect to Google servers (unless you decide to use their colab, which is optional), you can use it offline without contributing anything back in data or code.

rgovostes2• 2 years ago

Aside from Google having published open source OCR tools like Tesseract for 20 years, it's a thoughtless accusation in general. What exactly is the insinuation? "Training" is just thrown out as a bogeyman. I can't even come up with a fictional scenario in which Google does something nefarious with piles of handwritten documents they've somehow acquired.

backtoyoujim• 2 years ago

I spent a few years doing this without google.

I suggest it, and I suggest it without google.

henning• 2 years ago

Can this be used to create deepfake forged signatures/handwriting?

101008• 2 years ago

That was my initial thought too. For some important authors, there are a few high quality scans of their manuscripts, so with a tool like this you could create fake manuscripts -- and in a few years, after they are dead, say that you find them, create provenance, and boom, unpublished novel by JK Rowl- any author.

Legend24402• 2 years ago

No. It is not designed to be used as a generative model.

But other people have created handwriting generation models.

vlovich123• 2 years ago

If it can generate accurate shapes from a photo of a signature, why would you need a generative model? Just draw the SVG wherever you need it.

emporas• 2 years ago

I tried to use tesseract for OCR, 10 years ago, it recognized English good enough. tesseract was also developed by Google if I am not mistaken, but open source.

I tried to use it then, for non English language, for Greek, and it was very bad.

Happy to see some good OCR research based on transformers.

0x38B2• 2 years ago

I’ve been really impressed with Tesseract - I used it last month to add invisible OCR text (1) to scanned PDFs I reference a lot. My scans are quite good, but I was still impressed with the accuracy.

I also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation setting (2) in the terminal until I got output I could copy & paste to add a navigable table of contents.

1: with the help of https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.h..., “ Using different Page Segmentation Modes”

stavros• 2 years ago

I OCRed your comment with Tesseract:

``` I've been really impressed with Tesseract - | used it last month to add invisible OCR text (1) to scanned PDFs I reference a lot. My scans are quite good, but | was still impressed with the accuracy.

| also OCRed the TOC, playing with the page segmentation setting (2) in the terminal until | got output I could copy & paste to add a navigable table of contents.

1: with the help of https://github.com/ocrmypdfiOCRmyPDE

2: https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Command-Line-Usage.h..., “ Using different Page Segmentation Modes” ```

This kind of mirrors my earlier experience with Tesseract, if it can't get OCRing a screenshot right, what can it get right? It's not like "I used" is such a rare phrase either, but it replaced the I with a pipe.

jahewson• 2 years ago

Tesseract was originally created by HP, open-sourced, and later developed by Google. It's based on techniques from the 1980s and is pretty underwhelming. But at least it's free!

criddell2• 2 years ago

When I read somebody praising Tesseract I always wonder how their experience could be so different from mine. It's so much worse than what you can do with a modern phone.

WhatsName• 2 years ago

What is currently state-of-the-art when it comes to detetcting handwriting from photos?

Tracing strokes is nice but I would be more interested in converting my handtaken notes to markdown.

thimabi3• 2 years ago

I don’t know if they are the state-of-the-art, but handwriting recognition in iOS and ChatGPT do wonders for me — even with an ugly handwriting. Though these are more like 90% to 95% accurate, you should review the output before trusting it.

burnished• 2 years ago

Its pretty remarkable. I've used my phone to take pictures of stickers with model information that I couldn't otherwise reach and was able to copy the text from it. Really wild stuff.

markvdb• 2 years ago

I'm looking for something like that, but free/open source and offline. Suggestions welcome!

moatmoat• 2 years ago

such an exciting research project! I can imagine the impact this could have on education, e.g. handwriting notes of teachers in digital copies; or even preserve old documents in their digital counterpart

no-reply• 2 years ago

This is very interesting. I had this idea of imitating human handwriting in my bucket of todos for machine learning models, but never got to it. I guess we aren't far from it.

thimabi3• 2 years ago

From the title, I naively assumed this article would be about people relearning to make legible/beautiful handwritten notes after losing this ability. That is something I’m currently struggling with after many years of too much typing and not as much handwriting.

Google’s actual research does help people like me, by making our notes less awful digitally. But I’d love not to be dependent on tech innovations to make my handwriting better.

moron4hire• 2 years ago

Study comic lettering. Not saying it's the most efficient way of writing, but the process will teach you to think in terms of strokes and consistency. You can easily develop your own style from there.

al_borland• 2 years ago

If you’re serious about this, I’ve stumbled into areas of YouTube with people dedicated to this. Pick a font of how you want your writing to look, and practice, practice, practice. People make available (and sell) special lined sheets to get the height of various things right or help to guide the writer to the perfect slant.

You just have to have the time and interest to do the work, much like you probably did when first learning to write.

thimabi3• 2 years ago

How do you recommend that practice to be like? Simply trying over and over to perfect each letterform on empty lined sheets, based on a reference?

I’ve done a few handwriting workbooks, mostly consisting of block letter templates to fill. But each of them is incomplete on its own, and they don’t even share the same font, making it much harder to practice.

dbtc• 2 years ago

Also check out the resources on the r/handwriting subreddit.

prabhu-yu• 2 years ago

Good idea. May you please share youtube link you are referencing?

poulpy1232• 2 years ago

I'm also curious about the special sheets. Maybe I would be able to write legibly for once in my life :D

Al-Khwarizmi• 2 years ago

This has been mentioned somewhere else in the comment thread, but if you want to improve your handwriting, a good way is to use a fountain pen.

My handwriting is immensely better with a fountain pen than with ballpoint or gel pens; I suppose partly because the fountain pen forces you to an optimal position and angle (it's much more inflexible about that, you can't just push it against the paper in any angle and expect it to write), and partly because it provides a smoother experience and feedback.

You don't need to go overboard, the typical €20-ish Pilot Metro with medium nib or similar is more than enough.

WillAdams2• 2 years ago

I suggested Kate Gladstone's Handwriting Repair site elsethread:

https://handwritingrepair.info/

or see:

https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books

or John Howard Benson's lovely _The First Writing Book: Arrighi's Operina_ or Carolyn Knudsen's lovely _An Italic Calligraphy Handbook_ (which is much better than the modest title implies) and get a chisel edge marker or fountain pen.

fatbird2• 2 years ago

I noticed my handwriting was terrible, and consciously improved it by writing slower and being more mindful of writing neatly. A fountain pen helped me slow down, but fundamentally it was just a matter of slowing down and consciously forming nicer characters until it became easy to do so, at which point my speed increased--but I retained the habit of paying enough attention to make nice characters.

Deliberate practice (as in worksheets or exercises) is less important than just going as slow as you need to, to make the characters correctly, until your muscle memory builds up and brings back the speed.

8n4vidtmkvmk• 2 years ago

Can I just get good OCR for handwritten text? The last model that claimed to be "the best" was atrocious, only worked on PDFs of papers. ChatGPT is pretty decent but I was hoping for an offline, tailored solution

anu7df2• 2 years ago

Check out textify on appstore. I have found the accuracy to be great even for my terrible hand written text.

llm_trw2• 2 years ago

Now I'm wondering if they can use a similar architecture to derender paintings. It would the quite something to have a stroke perfect recreation of the Mona Lisa drawn by a modified pen plotter.

MacTea• 2 years ago

Rings a bell: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03798

jheriko• 2 years ago

seems overkill... for a bunch of reasons tbh. I guess the golden sledgehammer is just too tempting.

taking photos of notes is a weird compromise that nobody really wants... we need better tools not better post processing

anu7df2• 2 years ago

I don't think this is a hypothetical use case, at least for me. I like writing on paper with a fountain pen. But would like a digital version of the notes that are searchable. Reasonable ocr exists for conversion to text, but this would may be give slightly more accurate results.

Evidlo• 2 years ago

Can this work on low-power devices like note-taking tablets?

Legend24402• 2 years ago

You may be able to run it on an iPad, but probably not a Kindle.

But also, the point of this is to convert photos of text into pen strokes. A note-taking tablet doesn't need it because it already has the pen strokes you wrote.

Pamar• 2 years ago

Eric Hebborn (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hebborn) wrote "Italico per Italiani" (available in Italian only, alas https://www.amazon.co.uk/Italico-italiani-moderno-trattato-c...) as a textbook/manual to improve day-to-day, practical calligraphy. Maybe there is something similar in other languages too...

imoverclocked3• 2 years ago

I recently purchased a small refrigerator whiteboard and it's been really amazing with the combination of my iPhone's ability to take a picture of my handwriting (script or cursive) and copy/pasta into a text. It's not always perfect (nor is my handwriting!) but it's good enough to just replace a character or two and hit send.

This really tickles a bunch of things for me:

1) I am not sending a whole image (it's efficient)

2) I don't have to type/swipe at all (I'm not looking at a screen)

3) My s/o has easy access to the list at all times (it's not in a cloud)

4) It requires no power to update/maintain (markers last a long time)

5) It just feels so natural to grab a marker and write on the fridge when I exhaust something in that same fridge.

cptcobalt• 2 years ago

This is a nifty idea. I bet there'll be a HN-correlated pop in fridge whiteboard sales from this.

LoveMortuus• 2 years ago

Here's a suggestion if you want to avoid markers and such: LCD drawing tablets, I'm talking about the ones that look and function similarly to Etch and Sketch, but it uses a stylus and an LCD display, you can get these for less than 10€.

bathwaterpizza• 2 years ago

E-paper tablets these days run android, have fast refresh rates and multiple colors, they're great.

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

Tbh my handwriting is write only. Through decades of computer use it has deteriorated to the point were it is illegible even to myself.

Still. I will always be notetaking (and doodling) during meetings as it helps me order my thoughts.

ricardo812• 2 years ago

Same. Over 20 years (note taking especially) it is reduced to scribbles. The value of it is the time thinking while writing it mostly, though todo's are longer lived.

dr_sausages• 2 years ago

If your todo list is, or needs to be long lived, I think you might have more problems :D

I make notes on paper as the act of writing makes it stick about in my head longer than it would if I typed typing them out; though similar to you there's better penmanship from a spider that fell in ink.

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

I learned 10 finger typing when I was 8 in school (42 years ago), and have been glued to computer since then ; if I write something, or even sign something, it is complete gibberish, even to myself. To me it looks like those last stages of dementia scribbling, but I know that's not it because it was like this since I was 12 or so; my teachers couldn't read my writing and it affected my grades.

sneak2• 2 years ago

I’m the same way, and between that and the fact that I can type 120+wpm, makes me angry every time someone expects me to write something. Making dirt smudges on dried tree pulp is as archaic and outmoded as carving marks into bones, and in my view has no place in modern society outside of art.

eleveriven4• 2 years ago

Funny how it almost becomes its own language, legible only to the subconscious

blensor• 2 years ago

Same goes for my signature, I almost get anxious when I have to sign something on paper.

Writingdorky• 2 years ago

I like this 'my handwriting is write only'.

when i was 18, i looked at notes from my new coworker / manager and asked him how he learned to write that nice. He told me that he struggled writing cursive and just started writing letter by letter (print letter style?).

I changed my 'font' on that day and suddenly i was at least able to read what i wrote!

albert_e3• 2 years ago

Interesting.

We grew up learning to write separate letters.

Cursive was taught only very briefly as a way of telling us tgis also exists but don't bother too much about it.

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

Same here. And not only that, years of keyboard and mouse usage have done some damage to my wrists and nerves and it's actually painful for me to write.

soco2• 2 years ago

I believe that pain comes from misplaced expectations. We remember the times when we were fluent writing, or see it in others, and expect our hand to follow the same pattern with the same speed. So we push too hard. We should realize instead our hands must re-learn to write at this time, drawing the letters so slow like the small children do.

blitzar2• 2 years ago

Still. I will always be notetaking (and doodling) during meetings as it helps me not fall asleep and makes it look like I am paying attention.

pratibha_simone• 2 years ago

Same here.

artemonster• 2 years ago

Use boox or remarkable! You get both advantages of having the writing experience and their automatic recognition turns your scribbles into text!

eleveriven4• 2 years ago

Decades of typing, and now my handwriting is more of a cryptic art form than anything readable

Neonlicht2• 2 years ago

Even my mother who is 68 has severely deteriorated handwriting. Nobody writes by hand in a Western country since the smartphone.

globular-toast• 2 years ago

So you can't explain something to people on a whiteboard? I've been typing since I was a child but I'm still perfectly able to write legibly. If I thought my handwriting was that bad I would try to fix it as not being able to whiteboard would be terrible.

viraptor• 2 years ago

Many of us don't do physical whiteboards anymore. I diagram a lot, but all of it is online. Apart from own satisfaction, there's no reason for me to get better handwriting. (And there lots of things more satisfying than that) Addressing a letter once a year without a printed label, I can use block letters.

WillAdams2• 2 years ago

Try Kate Gladstone's "Handwriting Repair" course:

https://handwritingrepair.info/

the biggest thing which helped my handwriting was switching away from ball points to either felt tips or fountain pens.

Getting a Newton Messagepad also helped markedly, and since then I've been using tablets w/ Wacom EMR styluses where possible (NCR-3125 running PenPoint (donated to the Smithsonian by the guy who bought it) through a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360) and applications such as Nebo or Write by Stylus Labs.

criddell2• 2 years ago

You can fix it if you want to.

By the time I graduated from school, my handwriting was pretty bad. I could read it, but nobody else really could. Then I got a Palm Pilot and it's primitive handwriting recognition forced me to slow down and make better letter forms. At the same time I devoted a little effort to improve my cursive as well.

It's stuck with me and my handwriting is still fairly easy to read. My block caps look like something off an architectural drawing thanks to Palm's Graffiti system beating me up nearly 30 years ago.

aiisahik• 2 years ago

Can it read the scribble of my doctor? If so this is groundbreaking in the medical data entry space.

bobnamob• 2 years ago

The number of deaths attributable to misread treatment orders in hospitals is staggering.

I'd be very careful about sticking another layer of interpretation between doctor and treating nurse.

It's unfortunate med school doesn't teach block lettering like they used to teach to draftsmen/women.

sneak2• 2 years ago

Entering this sort of data correctly should be on the doctor. McDonald’s digital order style giant pancake buttons with huge touch targets with wide margins and large type on a huge touchscreen should solve the boomer objections.

Alternately, make it an app for the huge iPad Pro to solve the same problems. Make it as hard to fuck up as a fast food order. Disambiguation of input commands is a solved problem.

There isn’t really the will. Stupid windows apps with standard windows UI dropdowns that confuse and frustrate people not well versed with computer UI, running on standard low contrast small type displays with standard keyboard and mouse input, running on laggy RDP thin clients to underprovisioned workstation VMs in a data center is sadly the industry norm, and it still kills people.

bradydjohnson• 2 years ago

Almost no medical school or hospital in the United States use paper or handwriting anymore. All orders are electronic.

blitzar2• 2 years ago

It says a lot that the illegible writing killed people yet appears to be affected by doctors in the same manner as a bimbo uses a vocal fry affectation.

Glad to see my scripts from the doctor these days are typed not written.

nxobject• 2 years ago

As a lay reader, it's fascinating to see how much oomph we're getting out of LLMs on non-language-related tasks by figuring out clever encodings/linearizations.

brainzap• 2 years ago

It was a scary moment when Apple Notes corrected my writing in my own hand writing.

anshumankmr• 2 years ago

finally, I will be able to read my doctor's prescriptions.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

I still look forward to have programming environments on tablets that are able to use pen input, instead of forcing us to carry a bluetooth keyboard.

Apparently not something that anyone cares as business opportunity, because most likely most folks wouldn't pay for it, sadly.

another-dave• 2 years ago

I'm definitely faster at typing than writing though — especially so when it comes to something like code that often requires in-place editing, shuffling statements around etc.

I do like to work with paper & pen but moreso for ideation, diagramming, or todo lists rather than more "structured" inputs.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

Naturally the idea is to explore new concepts a mix of diagrams and coding,

Basically what Brett Victor in recent times, and others have been trying to do for decades,

"Grail on Rand Tablet from 1968 demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cq8S3jzJiQ

Or "Programmable Ink" at Strange Loop 2022,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifYuvgXZ108

There used to exist a graphical based Lisp for iPad, Lisping, unfortunely the app is long gone as it wasn't kept up to date with the OS.

Here is on old thread discussing it, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802131

The new iPad Calculator, is a more recent example of such ideas.

Vampiero• 2 years ago

Man that would be horrible UX, I wouldn't pay for that. I'd only use it if someone paid ME to do it

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

Different strokes for different folks.

tomjen3• 2 years ago

Can you touch draw 120 WPM?

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

No, nor do I care to type that fast.

Have the secretary typewriter contests from the 1950's come back into fashion?

sam296817495• 2 years ago

I can't imagine people code at an equivalent to 120wpm.

honeybadger1• 2 years ago

i still write notes daily and already this year have finished 4 notebooks...however, things i need to review are typed, i write to keep things in my mind as they are being discussed...example, if i encountered an error while reviewing a program execution i would write it down "encountered error during attempt to do x" but i would also type it in my notes in vastly more detail with screenshots and other points...handwriting to me is almost like tagging it in my mind so i just don't forget that it happened.

scrivanodev• 2 years ago

Very interesting experiment. I've been working on a handwriting application [0] for the past couple of years and incorporating the ability to take a picture to convert it into digital ink would be really nice.

[0] https://scrivanolabs.github.io

fredgrott• 2 years ago

Its not the writing PART!

It is the non automation part!

The experiment you can do to verify my point:

1. Write code by hand in plain text editor.....

What you notice....programming syntax and knowledge becomes easier to retain and re-learn.

No joke I do this several times a week.

albert_e3• 2 years ago

Can we replace / augment the keyboard with a white (or marked) paper to write on ... that is in view of a camera that has real time OCR

Feels like it will be a good addition to input devices

poulpy1232• 2 years ago

I'm wondering how well it would work with my crappy writing and the fact I write some letters revere from normal

vintermann• 2 years ago

A model that could turn "offline" handwriting (the ink on the page) into "online" (order and timing of the strokes) I think could be really useful for a historical HTR pipeline... but ultimately, we need end to end.

Why is historical HTR so neglected in all multi-task model evaluation benchmarks? There are millions of un-indexed handwritten historical documents which could give us a so much better understanding of our recent past. For that matter, it could give models much better understanding of our recent past.

A return to hand-written notes by learning to read and write

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