Well this is nifty!

Recently I had to spend more time than usual away-from-desk. I had also grabbed a cute notebook or three at the used bookstore (really! I was shocked, happy, and they had never been written in!) so I started jotting a story down in one. I generally don’t do a lot of longhand any more, so my hands are out of practice, but for whatever reason this story wanted to be written that way. If I didn’t write for too long at once my hands didn’t cramp. And some stories are just like that. I’ve had stories that insisted I drag out the typewriter. Now, there’s an arm workout!

My initial plan was to take the notebook, prop it next to the computer, and transcribe it. For one thing, this is a good way to make a first-pass revision tightening up sentence structure and word choices. For another, that’s really the only way to do it.

Or is it?

Turns out, no, it is not.

I haven’t got the tidiest handwriting in the world. However, I tried something for grins and giggles. I took photos of the pages, and fed them to two LLMs to see what they’d make of them. Gemini, and the local model (Qwen) which I have running on my Macbook. Both did a remarkably good job of transcribing to text which I could then copy and paste into a document. They also, to my great amusement, added grammar corrections. Not in the transcription, but at the end. One of them pointed out I’d misspelled my main character’s name, and asked if I meant to do that. No. Not at all.

I can’t say this will work for everyone. I can say it worked really well for me, and since this story insisted on being written longhand for the longest time (I did finally get into it on the computer) it was terrifically handy to be able to do this. I’m tickled the local LLM I’m using can do it, since that means I could do this without internet and under my full control. I know this will be something I’ll use more of. If not for fiction, for lists and notes and whee! So much potential! ohmigosh… I can transcribe my recipe lab books. Yeah. Suffice it to say that I’m excited about this particular tool.

All I did was ask if it could transcribe the handwriting attached and feed it the picture I’d taken of the notebook. The results needed a bit of revision, but that I planned to do anyway.