In our modern digital world, we spend a lot of our time creating and reading content from emails, online news articles, blogs, social media, and work memos. As a manual and seemingly non-digital form of content creation, a handwritten note might seem out-of-place in our modern digital world. However, new apps and devices have already brought back handwritten notes. Our current digital handwriting just needs some old-world cursive to add a special touch.

Here are a few examples of handwriting notes entering our digital world.

• Apple Pencil
• reMarkable Paper Tablet
• Wacom Bamboo Slate Smartpad
• Rocketbook Everlast Reusable Notebook
• Elfinbook Everlast Smart Notebook 2.0
• Wacom Bamboo Folio Smartpad Digital Notebook
• Repaper graphic tablet
• Moleskine Smart Writing System
• NewYes Smart Notebook
• SyncPen2 – NEWYES 2nd Generation Smart Pen
• Livescribe digital pens
• PDF Annotation
• LiquidText – PDF and document annotation and organization.
• MarginNote – PDF and multiple document mapping and notation.
• Adobe Acrobat – PDF annotations
• OCR – Optical Character Recognition for translating handwritten notes.

Even Apple has adapted handwriting notes into their messaging app. Using the Apple Pencil on an iPad, messages can be sent as handwritten notes. Apple advertises the feature as being able to handwrite or draw doodles as the message content with the Apple Pencil. Samsung has also heavily advertised their S Pen and its ability to handwrite annotations anywhere on the Samsung Android tablets.

Handwritten notes are also considerably faster at document annotations and note-taking than typing. Apps like Adobe Acrobat DC, MarginNote, and LiquidText are built on the concept that quick notes and annotations are much faster when handwritten. Apps like Notes Plus, MyScript Nebo, GoodNotes 5 are built with handwriting recognition. The handwriting recognition feature allows the app to translate handwritten notes for document search abilities automatically.

So, handwriting is far from obsolete. In fact, it has proven to be especially useful in our digital world. However, to be useful, handwriting still needs to be legible and neat.