My wife used the original version of Onenote back in the day on her Toshiba Portege tablet convertible. After picking up the Surface I called her up (she was working on a Saturday, yuck!) to ask, "So, uh, does Onenote actually recognize handwriting or what?" I described the silly assumption I had made that Onenote might have a mode for transcribing handwritten notes as-you-write and she laughed at me.
Good thing the pen wasn't a chief deciding factor. I thought it would be awesome. It's not.
Maybe in the future. The pen hardware seems solid.
I described the silly assumption I had made that Onenote might have a mode for transcribing handwritten notes as-you-write and she laughed at me.
OneNote, or more accurately, Office, does have this feature. I used it quite a bit in law school on my HP TouchSmart tm2 (a tablet/laptop hybrid that comes with a stylus and which predates the iPad). It's enabled in the Office Language Settings bar/menu.
OneNote also has an OCR function which can convert images into text (but not in realtime). It's only as good as the legibility of the image to be converted.
Are you referring to the black handwriting panel that you can switch to from the virtual keyboard? If so, yes, someone else pointed that out and that's nearly what I had in mind. I'm going to have to give it a test run to see if I can use it efficiently enough.
That said, my delusional/fictional Onenote--the application I had in mind when I thought, "Surface Pro pen + note application = awesome" was one that converted text scribbled on the page into digital text in-place as I wrote.
It may end up being a mostly academic difference, of course. I look forward to testing the black handwriting panel.
Good thing the pen wasn't a chief deciding factor. I thought it would be awesome. It's not.
Maybe in the future. The pen hardware seems solid.