Editors note: KemoNine wrote this post before realizing they had already written Digital Writing Tablet Mini Review 3 ish months ago. Some information below overlaps with the prior blog post but the core of this particular post is how KemoNine is using a drawing tablet day to day for handwriting.
Prelude
Let’s get this out of the way up front: I am a pen and paper human at heart. Despite being labeled a ’tech nerd’ I use pen and paper as a default medium. I do have some health hassles (read: serious, chronic health issues) that prevent me from using pen and paper with the frequency I desire and, arguably, need in order to stay on top of daily life and more.
Before my health hassles took away my ability to write on paper regularly, I went through a pack of Tomoe River paper at least once a month, filled multiple pages in a full size Traveler’s Notebook Bullet Journal daily and I filled up to three pages in an A5 sized journal every day. I also used to compose my blog posts, take meeting notes, diagram complex $dayJob tasks, and more on paper.
In short: I don’t fuck about and never fucked about when it comes to handwritten ’everything'.
What’s The Problem?
Thanks to my health hassles, I now only keep an A5 clipboard, an A5 leather envelope full of Tomoe River paper, an A4 clipboard, an A4 leather envelope full of Tomoe River paper, an EF Japanese fountain pen, a Schmidtt refillable rollerball pen and Platinum Carbon Black ink on-hand at all times. These items are always ‘good to go’ and I reach for them whenever I want to write and have the capacity to do so.
The issue I face is that I have health hassles that regularly make analog writing difficult, if not impossible. This is due to the fact my arms regularly get tremors, particularly my writing arm. Add in the fact one of my health hassles is related to memory and another is realted to speech processing (both of these benefit greatly from handwriting everything)… you get a recipe for major conflicting accessibility needs. The kind of conflicting needs that can cause chaos and a failure to stay on top of activies of daily life.
To say this is Not Good and Very Problematic would be incredible understatement.
What This Post Discusses
So how does a human reconcile this massive conflict of need? On one hand: everything needs to be written on paper in order to aid memory and speech processing/synthesis, on the other: writing on paper is neigh impossible more often than not. This is a horrific situation to find oneself within.
The answer turns out to be: ‘drawing tablets and creative adaptations of analog methodologies to digital medium(s)’. Yes, that’s pretty vague. It’s a highly individual set of ’life hacks’ and ‘reenvisioning of handwriting’ in order to address accessibility needs.
The rest of this post focuses on laying out the solution to my conflicting accessibility needs problem.
Crisis Mode
When my health hassles got bad enough to take away my ability to write in analog, I went through a bit of a crisis and spent years reapproaching and tweaking how I write by hand. I essentially spent years playing life hacker and searching for the ability to write by hand even when my health was at its worst. I couldn’t solve writing when my health is at is absolute worst but I did solve for when my health is merely ’terrible’ and ‘very bad’. When my health is at its worst and how I manage daily life in that situation is a dense topic and won’t be covered here.
Forshadowing
After doing a lot of research, testing, tuning and more I was able to get digital writing setup in a way that is very close to analog writing. I had a lot of false starts and went down more than a few paths that turned out to be overly complex bordering on the absurd. Thankfully I’m a persistent human and ultimately found a setup is ‘generally affordable’ in terms of monentary cost and not complex in nature. I can set this up within an hour from scratch and most of the time is waiting on downlaods and installers. The actual setup of the software and hardware is mere minutes.
Tellingly there is very little, if any, tuning needed for my setup. It’s very much ‘set and forget using defaults’. When I first started down this path I was so stunned at the simplicity I thought I had somehow missed a key piece of setup/information or screwed things up greatly in some way. Turns out the approach was really straight forward and only needed one key piece of setup to be effective.
Even more mind blowing is this setup works with XP-Pen, Huion and Wacom drawing tablets on desktop operating systems. It even works with Apple Pencil devices and Android devices that have a native stylus like the Samsung Galaxy Fold.
A Simple Solution
The setup is ridiculously simple: setup a competent note taking app and set the drawing tablet to use only a small portion of the computer display. On mobile you only need the note taking app.
Yes! It is that simple. It’s stunning even to me and I’ve been using this approach for three months now.
As always, the devil is in the detail and the simplicity of the solution hinges on a competent note taking app.
The Specifics
I use Saber as my note taking app. It’s this software that solved my problem in a huge way. It’s open source, runs on damn near any operating system and is very much designed to feel like you’re using a paper notebook. It also is simple but powerful and doesn’t overwhelm like OneNote and other ‘open ended’ note taking systems. It gets the hell out of the way and provides a focused environment for handwriting work without sacrificing competency or useful features.
I cannot recommend Saber enough.
I’ve used a ton of drawing and handwritten note taking software/apps over the years and Saber is powerful yet focused in nature. It’s a great balance of concerns and is perfect for my digital handwriting needs. If you’re looking for handwritten, digital notes. Start with Saber.
On mobile I use devices that have native stylus support and just use Saber outright. It’s a very boring and simple approach: buy a device with a native stylus, install Saber and start writing. It’s acutally that simple and easy.
For a desktop computer or laptop or slate running a non-mobile operating system I use a drawing tablet with a key tweak in addition to Saber. The key tweak here is setting the tablet driver to only use a small portion of the screen. For me this means only 1/3 of my primary monitor can be used with the tablet and I size the Saber window to only fill this area of the monitor. This is the largest portion of my screen I could use while still being able to reliably write and read my handwriting. You’ll likely need to play around with sizing in order to find what works best for you.
Constraining the area of the desktop that is the active zone for the tablet will let you be able to reliably handwrite on your computer. This was the key and, ultimatley, most important piece of setup and configuration. Once I constrained the active zone for the tablet… things Just Worked.
That’s It…
That’s it. Tune the active area of the tablet and use Saber. Done.
Hardware Notes
If you’re looking for hardware, any drawing tablet from XP-Pen, Huion or Wacom will work. The drivers for the devices let you constrain the area of the desktop that is active for the tablet.
‘Take a look at their options and go from there’ is my main advice. However, if you’re like me, you may want a drawing tablet sized to your preferred paper size used for analog writing. Each maker above has models that are close to or equal to various standard paper sizes. Just pull up the physical dimensions in the specs and check them against your preferred paper’s dimensions.
That said, I prefer A5 sized paper and chose the Wacom One (Small) drawing tablet. It’s close enough to the A5 paper dimensions to work well for me and it has stylus nibs that are ‘scratchy’ so it feels more like I’m writing on paper. YMMV here as I know some folk will prefer the ‘scratchy’ nib and others will prefer a ‘smooth’ nib. I’d recommend trying both (nibs tend to be inexpensive) and going with the style that works best for your preferences.
That’s Everything
That’s everything. It really is as simple as ‘install Saber, set drawing tablet to use only a portion of the display, start writing’. You may need/want to do some additional tuning but it should be straight forward and minimal. The key to this is constraining the active area of the tablet to allow reliable handwriting input. Once you get the constraint right for your handwriting, things should Just Work.
Addressing Accessibility
The best part for my accessibility needs is Saber has an ‘undo’ function. This allows me to write despite my health hassles. If I scribble some words that are not legible, I can undo the scribbles and try again. No more pages of crossed out words, just a nice handwritten document that has my words, not my non legible scribbles. Yes, it can be frustrating rewriting things and using undo heavily during a health hassle flare but it’s better than pages of crossed out, non legible writing and it’s a hell of a lot better than not being able to write anything by hand.
I’ll take semi-frustrating but very usable over ’none’ and over ’non legible’ and over ’too many crossouts to be useful’ any day.
I need my handwriting and now I have it. Even on my really bad health hassle days.