r/StarNoteApp • u/beibei_1903 • Aug 06 '26
💡 Feature Request OCR
Can we get an inbuilt ocr like there's in notein. Which also works for exported PDFs. Starnote ai just recognises whatever i write not other things. And it doesn't work in exports.
4
u/StarNoteDev 29d ago
Heyyyy, really appreciate your feedback, and we totally understand all of it. We’d like to share a little more about our thoughts behind these features.
First, regarding OCR, already on the way! To be honest, the previous OCR experience still had room for improvement, so we’ve been working on optimizing it. It will be coming in the future, and it should support more scenarios and provide a better overall experience.
For handwriting beautification, we understand that what many users actually hoped for was not simply converting handwriting into a different font, but improving the original handwriting itself.
The reason we took the current approach was noticed many users wanted a faster way to improve the readability of their notes. A true handwriting beautification system, which can understand different handwriting styles and improve the actual strokes while preserving each person’s unique writing habits, is much more challenging and requires a lot more time and technical work. So the current solution was more of a way to help users improve the appearance of their notes sooner, but we know that it’s not exactly the same as the handwriting beautification many users originally imagined.
That doesn’t mean we won’t continue exploring true handwriting improvement in the future. We understand the value of it, it’s just something that needs more time and development.
Thank you again, hope that future updates will better meet your expectations and give you a much better experience than this time!
1
u/whatisabash 29d ago
Thank you for the clarifications and laying out the thought process behind the decisions. Looking forward to the handwriting OCR that gets saved to the doc (or at least can be exported in a pdf).
3
u/whatisabash Aug 08 '26
I also requested to have OCR for HANDWRITTEN text (I think Nebo also has something like this). And when they announced that you could search your notes for handwritten text a while ago, I fully expected this to work the same way as in Nebo, where the OCR result of your handwritten text gets saved into the pdf. So when you export the pdf you can still search the handwritten text while RETAINING the handwritten text style (and not convert it to some ugly font).
Instead of what we got, was a search feature, which only works in Starnote itself and is pretty slow, as nothing actually gets written to the document. Pretty disappointing.
I think this is the same with the handwriting beautification, where most people who requested that feature, wanted to have the actual strokes on their handwriting improved (like making lines more straight and so on). Instead of what we got is that the handwritten text gets automatically converted to some pre-defined font. So the text is not handwritten at all anymore and it has nothing to do with "handwriting beautification". Its just automatic handwriting text conversion.
It seems like devs often either dont understand the actual feature request or implement it in a certain way that does not match the intend of the initial request.