Tuesday September 23, 2025; 11:38 AM EDT
- Last week I bought the Viwoods AIPaper Mini and therefore I have been thinking about tablets and e-ink tablets in particular. While I appreciate the different companies pushing the boundaries of tablet use cases a problem is that there is no standard for data beyond PDF. I can save/backup my writing on both the Boox and Viwoods devices to PDFs but I can't search within those PDFs, all I can do is browse them. #
- On the Viwoods I can't even search on the device for text that I write. The work around is to use the AI Text Conversion on the device then copy and paste the result in to Obsidian. The text conversion is not flawless but works well enough and the net effect is a process akin to converting a fleeting note to a permanent note. #
- Boox does provide a way to search for text within handwriting of notebooks on the device and in their web app but the PDFs it generates does not include an index for searching. #
- Ultimately what I want is how OneNote seems to work (or at least used to) on the iPad. Prior to buying the Boox Note Air 3C I wrote all of my work meeting notes on the iPad Air using the Apple Pencil in OneNote. I used the integration between Outlook and OneNote to create meeting note templates for each of the meeting and then wrote my notes in the resulting page. It seems OneNote does handwriting to text conversion in the background and embeds that result with the note so that I can be used for search both on the device and in the desktop version of the app. #
- I can run and use OneNote on both the Viwoods and Boox devices, in fact it works better on the Viwoods, but it does not look like the Android version of OneNote has the handwriting to text conversion, so I can only search on titles and note on words in my handwriting. #
- I understand that the constraints of the devices may make it difficult to include handwriting to text conversion, although it seems to work on the Viwoods, just not automatically. It occurs to me what would work well for me is if Viwoods or Boox or a third party provided a back end web app for storing the PDF versions of handwritten notes and can do the processing of text conversion and indexing to make them searchable. #
- In doing a little bit of searching, I find Pen to Print that makes searchable PDFs but costs $180 per year to make 1000 PDF pages per month searchable. I could buy a month for $24.99 and then cancel. #