Write the word, take a picture, and open it in Photoshop.
For this tutorial, I drew the number 50. I used a normal black sharpie on a piece of loose leaf paper. You can use whatever drawing tool you want: paint, pen, crayon, marker, etc. Plain white paper is best, but anything will work. Then, take a simple photo with your phone and open it in Photoshop.
Use the levels panel to give it scan-worthy contrast.
First step: Let’s make this image look like we scanned it. Click command + L (ctrl + L on a PC) or go to Image > Adjustments > Levels. You should see a graph of the light in the image. A “hill” on the left shows how much black is in the image while a hill on the right shows how much white is in the image. (Pictures of handwriting usually have way more white.)
Your goal is to bring the right-most slider to the beginning of the “hill” on the right side of the graph. This will flatten all of the white in the image to be pure white, instead of giving shades of gray. (If you used a colored marker instead of black, move the black slider to the farthest point of the black hill to intensify that, too.) You should see your image shift from a photo to a crisp image that looks like you scanned it!
Remove the background using the color range tool and a mask.
If you didn’t use loose leaf paper, you can probably skip this step—but you’ll still need to do this if you want the image to have a transparent background! Go to Select > Color Range and click on the writing in your image. Adjust the fuzziness until all you can see in the preview is your writing (for me, I made sure no loose leaf lines were visible). Then, click the mask button to make the rest of the image transparent. You should only see the digitized handwriting.
Color the handwriting using a colorize filter.
If you don’t want plain black text, you can add color! Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. In this window, click the box beside the word “colorize.” From here, you can choose any color and increase the saturation and lightness until you have colored your handwriting.
And voila! Here you have an editable photoshop layer for your handwriting. From here, you can save it as a .png and use it in other programs, show it to a tattoo artist, or even import it into Illustrator and image trace it to make it into a vector. The possibilities are nearly endless—hopefully this tutorial inspires you to use your digital handwriting more often in design.

Scan It as an Image: If you want to digitize handwritten material, all you need is an ordinary. Made for the Windows platform, FreeOCR works with images and PDFs. Conversion time is very fast, but accuracy is dismal 4 Free Online OCR Tools Put to the Ultimate Test 4 Free Online OCR Tools Put to the Ultimate Test With advances in OCR technology, converting text and Images from your scanned PDF document into the editable text formats is easier. Handwriting fonts are good for logos, headers, titles, notes but not for regular text. Hasty Tasty created by David Kerkhoff is a typical font in handwriting style. As its name suggests, Hasty Tasty looks like a hastily penned down recipe, a quickly jotted down note.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on 12/9/17.

It’s easier than ever to jot down digital notes on computers and phones, but many people still prefer the traditional feeling of writing with ink on paper. (After all, this method served us well for hundreds of years of human history.) The problem is that you can’t organize and search through handwritten notes the way you can with files on a digital device.

Or can you? A number of smart devices offer to digitize your scribblings, either as you write or shortly afterward. In addition to storing images of your notebook pages in electronic form, some of these hardware and software packages actually convert your writings into searchable text. Here are four of our favorite systems for converting handwritten notes to text, along with some simpler app-only solutions.

Moleskine Smart Writing System

Notebook maker Moleskine has a three-part system for saving your scribbles: a Bluetooth-enabled pen records your hand motion as you write, special dotted paper (available in a variety of sizes) helps track the position of the pen on the page, and an app (for Android, iOS, and Windows 10) combines this input to create and digitally manage copies of your notes.

The app is smart enough to convert your scribbles into a readable, searchable Microsoft Word file. If you’d prefer to stick with the handwritten version of your notes, you can make their appearance more readable by adjusting the thickness of the ink lines. No matter how you choose to keep your writing, the app lets you organize, tag, and export it to services such as Google Drive, the Apple Notes app, or an email client.

In another perk, you don’t need to keep your phone or computer nearby as you write—the pen alone can store roughly 1,000 pages of notes in its onboard memory. When you do have a chance to transfer this information to the app, the pen’s memory will reset so you can fill it with another 1,000 pages.

All of these smarts come at a price. Together, the notebook and pen cost $260 on Amazon, although Moleskine throws in the apps for free. If you run out of paper, each extra notebook will cost you between $9 and $30 or more, and ink refills have a price of $8 or more for a pack of 10.

Livescribe

Text To Handwriting Generator

The Livescribe system works similarly to Moleskine’s: you write on dotted paper with a smart pen, and an app digitizes this input. However, it gives you more options than the previous system, starting with its two pen models: the Symphony, which syncs with a phone app (for Android or iOS), and the 8GB Echo, which plugs into a computer (either Windows or macOS) with a USB cable.

Both Livescribe pens can save digital notes on their built-in storage until you have time to sync. When you do export your writing, you can do so in the form of PDFs or images.

While they share these abilities, each model has its own advantages. The Symphony ($110 on Livescribe’s website), like the Moleskine pen, has handwriting recognition that can convert your scribblings into text, allowing you to search through your notes for specific words and phrases. You can also automatically sync your files with your preferred cloud storage service. The 8GB Echo ($190 on Livescribe’s website), meanwhile, benefits those who like to keep audio recordings as well as written notes. Not only can it record clips through a built-in speaker, it can play back your written notes in audio form if you tap it against the paper.

When you add the cost of your chosen pen to the cost of a notebook, Livescribe’s overall price winds up slightly lower than Moleskine’s. Its gridded notebooks’ prices start at about $10, or you can print out a free template to make your own dotted sheets. Ink refills will set you back about $7 for a pack of five.

Neo Smartpen N2

You may recognize the Neo Smartpen N2—Moleskine uses a rebranded version of the pen for its own Smart Writing Set. Both systems will provide the same kind of tracking and technology, but because N Notebooks (the Neo’s version of the required dotted paper) have a price range starting at just under $15, the Neo’s overall cost is slightly cheaper.

Many of the Moleskine Smart Writing set’s features also apply to the Neo. The $169 Smartpen N2 can hold around 1,000 pages of notes. Once you sync them with the app (for Android and iOS), you can tag and organize them, adjust the color and thickness of the ink lines, transform them into searchable text, and share them in formats including GIF, PNG, and MP4 on social media.

Turn Text Into Handwriting Free

Even ink refills have the same cost as they do for the Moleskine system: about $9 for a 10-pack. The big differences come down to which color scheme you want for your pen and which type of notebooks you prefer to write in and carry around.

Wacom Bamboo Smartpads

Graphic design giant Wacom has a slightly different system for digitizing your writing. Instead of buying or printing out a dot-gridded notebook, you simply clip paper to a pressure-sensitive pad that can detect the strokes of a specialized pen. The newest iteration of Wacom’s Smartpads, the Bamboo Folio ($150 to $200 on Wacom’s website), comes in two sizes: A4 (letter) and A5 (half-letter). You may be able to find another version, the Bamboo Slate, online at third-party retailers like Amazon, but it doesn’t appear to be available in Wacom’s store any longer.

To use a Bamboo pad, place some paper over it and scribble away with the pen. Your writing will sync with the app (for Android and iOS). From there, you can export your notes to writing services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, an