Lens lets you drop 50 years in less than a minute

[Jon123Jon]

Discovered Microsoft Lens this week. And suddenly I am 29 instead of 79, back when handwriting was king. And thanks to Mrs. Windell, my 3rd grade teacher... I learned to handwrite. Penmanship. Cursive, whatever.

Microsoft Lens is a free program. iPad, PC, Mac. Write a page of text with your pen or pencil. Take a photo of it. Bring that photo into Lens, and it will translate your handwriting into computer plain text in less than a minute. Not perfect, but pretty good. The attached pic is a screen capture from Lens... my writing at top, the plaintext output below.

There may be no real use for this, except the joy for those of us at a certain age to have an excuse to handwrite again. Hey, didn't Nabokov write Lolita on a bunch of index cards? Downside -- you have to write carefully. If you write fast, the characters get sloppy... and the output needs more editing. But it is interesting. Deja vu, like the kids messing with film cameras and record players. But can you really go back to the past? Maybe, sort of, not really?

Edit -- am using a purple disposable Pilot Varsity fountain pen that I bought from Amazon in 2015. Lots of color choices. Lasts a long time, never dries out, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BBC1IS/

[Boy]

You were lucky with Mrs. Windell. The app produced an alphabet soup out of my scanned handwritten text.