Adobe Indesign says no, as well. Besides illumination and penwork and the like, I'm always impressed by the richness of page layouts, the freedom in (writing across) columns etc.
In one superstition, people who pull up this root will be condemned to hell, and the mandrake root would scream and cry as it was pulled from the ground, killing anyone who heard it. Therefore, in the past, people have tied the roots to the bodies of animals and then used these animals to pull the roots from the soil.[2]
—Wikipedia citing John Gerard (1597). “Herball, Generall Historie of Plants”. Claude Moore Health Sciences Library. Archived from the original on 2012-09-01.
A few weeks ago I saw Ben Stokes’ post about PaperWebsite.com and my immediate reaction was, “I have to be able to do that!” I’ve long enjoyed writing by hand over typing as the tactile feel of of pen or pencil and paper is such an enjoyable one. I particularly enjoy using a nice fountain pen on high quality paper.
Obviously there was a route to doing a workflow like this as Ben had shown. I just needed to figure out a method with a low enough barrier that I could personally implement for doing this with my own WordPress website.
A Quick Solution
Not being a serious coder, I immediately began looking for ways I could leverage some of the IndieWeb building blocks my site supports. Micropub seemed like a no-brainer for the posting portion since I’ve got an endpoint using the Micropub WordPress plugin. Certainly not wanting to manually re-type everything once I was finished writing, I needed a way of converting my handwriting to text and then automating a way to plug that into my micropub client.
A short burst of searching revealed that Google Docs could do Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on photos. I pulled out my IFTTT app and found a recipe for taking a photo and saving it to Google Drive. Then I set up another recipe to watch a particular folder in Google Drive and take whatever text appears in new documents and send it to my website using a webhook that uses my Micropub endpoint. The whole thing only took a half hour from idea to a working prototype. In the end it took a tap to open IFTTT on my phone and another tap to take the photo. Then I had to manually open the document to trigger the OCR. Finally, I had to manually open and edit the post before posting.
I had set the micropub client to post as a draft as a default just in case the OCR wasn’t perfect. This was fortunate as the Google photo OCR was so solid that the letters “Dia” of the microscopic text from the word “Diamond” partially visible on my pen cap that was in the photo got pulled into the post.
In the few times I’ve used this workflow so far, I’ve mostly done straight text and syndicated posts to Twitter, Mastodon, and Micro.blog. Perhaps in the future I might set things up to add HTML links, but they’re fairly easy to add at the editing stage.
Since I started my experimentation, a few others in the IndieWeb community have noticed the paperwebsite.com site. Greg McVerry popped up and linked to it as well. He mentioned that he had a digital notebook with OCR capability. This reminded me that I’ve got both a Livescribe Echo pen and a Rocketbook notebook with a Pilot Frixion pen that has an app for uploading digitized images of notebook pages. I hadn’t done OER with Livescribe in ages, so I pulled out the Rocketbook, which is cleverly erasable and thus reusable not to mention being fairly inexpensive. A bit of quick set up allowed me to take a photo of a page which automatically uploads to Google Drive and does its own OCR process. This already dovetails with my prior process, so the whole thing is much smoother. As a result, I’m composing this post in my Rocketbook notebook and will automatically upload and post it to my site as a draft. I’ll probably add some links, a photo or two, and then publish it in a bit.
Rocketbook Interface
The Rocketbook notebook has some solid pages with an odd shiny texture and feel, presumably part of the technology that makes it easy to wipe them clean for reuse. The bottom of each page has seven different faint icon images which are meant to allow the app to determine where to send the digital copy of the notes. One can send them via email or to a variety of storage or sharing services. I could imagine having different recipes set up to allow one to publish their notes to different websites based on the icon X-ed out. Given the micropub possibilities, one could also use the icons as a means of differentiating post kinds (for example, indicating that a particular post is a note, an article, or a bookmark). Another alternate idea would be to use the icons as a means of selecting which services to syndicate your content to (for example, the diamond could mean syndicate this post to Micro.blog, the bell could mean Mastodon, and the clover syndicates the post to Twitter).
The overall process is quite elegant and pleasant. The OCR for Rocketbook is reasonably good aside from a few spelling errors which are easy enough to click and fix. I’ll admit that I far prefer using a fountain pen on some Tomoe River paper to using the Rocketbook paper and the Frixion pen, but really, who wouldn’t?
Handwritten notes for your digital zettelkasten or personal wiki
Since I’ve already got most of the infrastructure, I’ve gone the extra mile and set things up so that I can take notes on index cards zettelkasten-style and use a similar set up to post them to my Obsidian vault using similar IFTTT recipes.
I’m sure, now that there are multiple proofs of concept, some enterprising developer will build a custom micropub client to do all of this work automatically or with a few options built into a clever interface.
I could see pen and paper manufacturers (Moleskin, Leuchtturm, Rocketbook, etc.) creating apps for doing this too. I’d love to see and hear about others trying this out for themselves. Hopefully it can be done with almost no code or some easy cut and paste from my example. Ask if you need help, and I’ll see what I can do to help.
IFTTT Webhook settings
This following will be roughly standard for WordPress endpoints using the plugin, but they can obviously be modified for your platform of choice.
While doing some of this I did come across some older examples of handwriting to websites. Aside from handwriting typography which I think is usually ugly, I saw some interesting examples from Jeff Bridges[1] [2], gRegor Morrill, and scrolled through some great examples of handwritten and typed Tweets by Alton Brown. In his case, he was simply taking photos of his writing, but it worked! I’ll admit he had some fun and was definitely creative about it. Hopefully Twitter always exists to save the copies for him.
In short, I’ve now got another great way to post to my website. I love the great old school tactile user interface of pen and paper. Now I’m glad to have a reason to be able to do more of it in an ever-digitized culture.
Until I start working on cuneiform solutions…
Write On! 🖋
Editor’s note: This post was originally handwritten on Dec 16, 2021 at 20:15.
Testing out a method for manually posting status updates to Twitter, potentially allowing for multiple handwritten drafts.
A test to automatically post and Syndicate a handwritten note from my notebook to my website and then Twitter.
Am I wrong in thinking that the reason they’re calling it Web3 instead of Web 3.0 for parallelism with Web 2.0 is that hashtagging it on Twitter just doesn’t work with the period in there? (i.e. #Web3.0 doesn’t link properly on Twitter the way it does on my website.) And if I’m right, is this a problem that we can expect the blockchain to fix? #HistoricalLinguistics
Sure, I’d love to support it. What’s the URL you want NewsBlur to share to? I can have it auto-fill in the title and url. Also, for bonus credit, what’s the url of the favicon?
There’s two different discussions happening here, one seemingly about posting to micro.blog and the other about posting to any website that has a micropub endpoint. Since micro.blog accounts all have micropub endpoints the second method subsumes the first.
In general most micropub clients authenticate using an IndieAuth mechanism which micro.blog also supports and this allows apps (Newsblur in this case) to send formatted data (an article’s title, URL, and a person’s reply, for example) to be published on third party websites. Developers interested in the pieces might inquire in the IndieWeb chat about the quickest and easiest method for implementing or to see some other examples and find open sourced clients/servers that already do most of the heavy lifting: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev. It would be great to see Newsblur added to the growing list of clients that can publish to independent third party websites.
An intriguing Christmas present from @iA !! The Notebook For Writers, where “the guides disappear — leaving nothing but plain, clear, aligned text.” pic.twitter.com/MiBCV0qtRj
If iA is getting into physical notebooks, I’m hoping they’ll also attach the other leg of the triangle with their app’s Micropub support and allow me to publish my handwriting to my website. See: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/20/55799844/ for details.
Replied toa thread by Eleanor Konik and Aitor García Rey (Twitter)
Yeah I'm happy to hand-import edge case things, I'd be very very happy with "75% of the internet's recipes can be imported into cooklang format and therefore into my #obsidianmd vault"
I thought @KevinMarks‘ http://www.unmung.com/ tool might have some facility like this. I know he’d done some work with BBC recipes in the past, perhaps he knows of a custom tool(s) or parsers with better fidelity and conversion to either HTML or Markdown for Obsidian use?
Based on some recent discussions with a variety of people I’m helping to organize an IndieWebCamp pop-up session on personal libraries online. If you’ve ever considered how to own all your own Goodreads-like reading data and still interact with others or you’ve got an website, product, or application that attempts to do this, this is sure to be your cup of tea (or maybe we should say “favorite genre”).
We’ll focus discussion on personal libraries on one’s site(s) and how they can interact with each other. How can we pool data and resources for the common good? How can we provide Goodreads like functionality in a decentralized manner? What pieces are we missing? How can we add them? Are there any easy ways we can standardize the pieces for better site-to-site interoperability? How can we interoperate with other projects like Mastodon and BookWyrm or data sources like Open Library?
Organizationally, depending on attendees and needs we may break our time up into two or three facilitated sub-sessions to focus on and cover specific topics of interest. If you have an idea for a sub-session topic (we’ll operate Bar-Camp style the day of the event) you’d like to see or facilitate please indicate it below.
If you’d like to help facilitate the session or volunteer in running it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Want to start discussing the topic prior to the session? Feel free to meet up online in the IndieWeb chat.
We’ll try to announce a date around mid-January to provide time for people to reserve the time.
Halsted (cygnoir.net)
Samuel Clay (The NewsBlur Forum)