More Powerful Handwriting Recognition

iPadOS 14 takes Apple Pencil support to a whole new level by making handwriting recognition as powerful as working with typed text in a whole lot of cool new ways.

In practical terms, what this means is that you’ll be able to take any handwriting jotted into apps like Notes on your iPad and select and manipulate that handwriting just as if it were a block of text. You can copy and paste sections of handwriting, move them around to insert more handwriting or text, and even highlight and change colours, and this can all be done using the same gestures that you would use with typed text. There’s also going to be a “Copy as Text” option that will allow you to convert handwriting into typed text for pasting into another app. The standard iOS data detectors will also work for recognizing things like phone numbers and email addresses and making them tappable.

In addition, Apple is adding a new feature known as Scribble which will allow you to use the Apple Pencil to write in any text field on iPadOS and have it recognized as text. For example, you’ll be able to write directly into a Safari text field to do a web search, or add new Reminders simply by jotting them down with the Apple Pencil. You’ll even be able to delete words by scratching them out with the Pencil, and it can recognize Chinese characters too.

Lastly, Apple is also adding automatic shape conversion to allow hand-drawn shapes to be automatically converted into proper polygons, retaining the same size and angle that they were drawn at.