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I hope I'll be able to upload scanned sheets with handwriting on them and have them recognized.

I've tried LiveScribe and various other tablet handwriting recognition and being able to take a picture of/scan a handwritten sheet and make it into a google doc would blow anything else out of the water.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how niche such a feature would be or if it would be worth their while.


Recognizing scanned handwriting is much harder than allowing handwriting as direct input from a touchscreen.

"Online" handwriting recognition takes as input pen locations over time (strokes), and outputs the corresponding words. "Offline" handwriting recognition takes an image of handwriting. It is much harder, since it has much less information.


They already have OCR for the Google Book project (I assume). And they have this project, would it be difficult to combine the two?


They also do book OCR via recaptcha[1]. If I ever see my handwriting as a captcha string, I don't know what I'd think.

[1] http://www.google.com/recaptcha


They might be using it because of the study about font legibility and learning retention that was all over the news last year:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_revenge_of_comic...

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/01/13/new-stu...

Kathy Sierra and Burt Bates also used these types of fonts in their "Head First" series for O'reilly. I have never gotten into those books, but many people love them.


Now that is genuinely interesting. Of course, the raw data is hidden behind a paywall, so we don't really know that "significant" means to the author, or whether the test included slides or just raw text.

Still, this is one of those rare times when I could be right about looking professional (it looks cheesy, can't argue that) but completely wrong if it actually leads to higher retention.


Based on your comments and looking around the site, I was excited about checking Mog out. Requiring facebook is a deal breaker for me. Why restrict the way users can join?



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