Summary
E Ink tablets aim to make writing pleasant with textured screens and stylus, but can struggle with handwriting recognition.
The reMarkable Paper Pro is flexible in the file formats it supports, but it's torn between being a digital notebook and something more capable.
This problem exists on devices like the Kindle Scribe and Supernote Nomad, too.
Odds are, if you've purchased an E Ink tablet like the reMarkable Paper Pro , you bought it to take notes by hand. The Paper Pro, and devices like it are designed to make writing as pleasant as possible. They have textured screens, weighted styli with working digital erasers, and software that can capably reproduce pencils, pens, and brushes. The thing is, most people don't only live and work off of an E Ink tablet. Anything you write needs to be able to be exported and understood in some other form.
The reMarkable Paper Pro and the reMarkable 2 include the ability to convert handwriting to printed, editable text as long as you have an internet connection, so that you can work with it on your device, share it to your desktop computer via the reMarkable app or with colleagues over email. While that might sound nice, the sticking point for reMarkable and basically every other E Ink tablet I've tried is that they're actually quite inconsistent when it comes to understanding chicken scratch. It's a fundamental shortcoming of these devices, and an illustration of the tension when you pitch something as a distraction-free digital notebook that nevertheless does offer features you'd find on a much more traditional computer.
A Kindle Colorsoft being held on top of a reMarkable Paper Pro. Related
Can a reMarkable Paper Pro replace your e-reader?
The E Ink tablet has a display that's up to the task, but whether you can use it depends on your e-books and comics.
Capturing and translating handwriting is table stakes for E Ink tablets
Good tablets let you put things in them and take things off them
Writing on a reMarkable Paper Pro on a desk.
Whether you're buying your tablets from reMarkable, Supernote, Boox , or Amazon, you're going to get a fairly flexible device when it comes to the kinds of files they can open. PDFs work everywhere, and plenty of devices offer integrations with cloud services like Google Drive or productivity software like Microsoft Word. The basic purpose of these devices is to take notes, with reading and annotating files an important, but secondary skill.
Unless you want to keep piles of PDFs of your handwriting, you have to convert them into text you can use off of your device.
That makes handwritten text the vast majority of the content you're dealing with. There are exceptions: If you have the reMarkable Paper Pro's excellent Type Folio keyboard case, which lets you create printed text just as easily as you can write it, you'll have more options. The point stands, though. Unless you want to keep piles of PDFs of your handwriting, you have to convert them into text you can use off of your device. That makes the ability to both accurately capture and convert handwriting critical for a device like the reMarkable Paper Pro to be useful to the largest amount of people possible. It also makes the way it currently works on the tablet that much more frustrating.
Competing tablets aren't much better
The notebook menu with the "Convert to text" option.
At any point while you're taking handwritten notes on the reMarkable Paper Pro, you can access the sidebar menu and convert your handwriting into text. The tablet takes what you've written, processes it (provided you have an internet connection), and then spits it out on a new page. It's competent, but far from perfect if you include any kind of hand-drawn formatting, like bullet points, underlines, or grids. If you use any of those to structure your work, things can get pretty messy.
To convert your writing, reMarkable uses a handwriting recognition model from MyScript (also featured in devices like the Kobo Elipsa 2E ) which uses AI to recognize handwritten letters and convert them to printed text. When you compare conversion on the reMarkable Paper Pro to what you can get on the Kindle Scribe, the experience isn't radically different. Amazon's made a concerted effort to improve and expand the note-taking experience with the launch of the second Kindle Scribe, but it hasn't made note-taking more of a focus. The tablet still wants you to spend money on books. The Supernote Nomad faired a bit better when it came to converting my handwriting, but the workflow of getting my writing off the tablet wasn't nearly as smooth.
Converted text on a reMarkable Paper Pro.
You can excuse some of this inconsistency with how each company approaches their devices. Supernote and Boox (though I haven't gotten a chance to try one) pitch their E Ink tablets as multipurpose tools that can manage your calendar, check email, read books, and capture notes. In comparison, the Kindle Scribe is an e-reader with a few extra features and the reMarkable Paper Pro is a whole other beast entirely. As a company, reMarkable seems doggedly committed to treating its tablets as digital notebooks. Their connection to cloud services and ability to send files over email are necessary to exist in the 21st Century, but both tablets live and die by the experience you get on the device itself.
Up to this point, all of these companies offer handwriting conversion for free, something you sometimes have to pay for inside of iPad note-taking apps.
The reMarkable Paper Pro feels like a notebook first, drafting tool second, and anything approaching a modern computer a distant third. That makes the device more in line with something like that than a traditional tablet. Converting handwriting to text is nice to have, rather than an essential part of the experience of using a remarkable 2 or reMarkable Paper Pro. That makes the "digital" part of a device like this a harder sell. It's digital in terms of its storage and ability to read files, less so in the ways it can communicate with other devices or convert your work into other forms.
Handwriting conversion may only be improved, rather than fixed
Transcription software has similar problems
If you've ever used software to transcribe an audio recording, you know that it's frequently incorrect, too. AI-powered transcription software has improved enough for people to avoid having to pay a human to edit it, but it's still inconsistent. Converting handwriting to text seems like it's subject to the same limitations. It can improve, but it can never be fixed.
A color E Ink tablet with a stylus on a white background.
reMarkable Paper Pro
reMarkable's Paper Pro tablet has a color E Ink display and front lighting to make it more useful and flexible than the average e-reader.
In addition to new ways to find or organize files, being better at converting handwriting to text is the best way to actually improve devices like the reMarkable Paper Pro. It wouldn't fundamentally change how I use it, but it would make everything a bit better.