I always have journaled on basic white paper with blue lines.
For years, I’ve had a morning ritual of journaling. Over time, I accumulated piles of notebooks that I packed and carried around whenever I moved. Then came my decision to sell everything and hit the road for a nomadic life. Some stuff was easy to get rid of: give it to the Goodwill. Some sold on eBay. Some went into the trash. But my journals. What to do with all my journals?
I started going through them and most of it was drek written to work things out in my life. Still, about ten pages or so in each book was really good stuff. I set to work transcribing those pages and got about 50% done before I decamped. The rest I packed away as ripped out pages in one of the few boxes I stored in my sister's basement. Transcription turned out to be a real drag and while I tell myself I’ll get to them someday, part of me is hoping for some serious water damage to absolve me of guilt for failing my creative oeuvre.
I headed out with my two suitcases for a year of wandering. I ditched the paper for a Macbook Air figuring to skip the whole transcription purgatory at the end. Huge fail. Typing is not the same as scribbling. I lapsed. I only journaled now and then. When I did, the writing was very "thinky" which happens when I write on a computer.
When the regular iPad came out with the Apple Pencil capability, I sprang for it. I bought it for making digital art but as a bonus, thanks to the Nebo handwriting app, I got my journaling groove back.. Nebo’s clean design of blue lines on a white background evokes the familiar feeling of writing paper. It’s easy to learn and pretty intuitive.
With the iPad, I can journal with images as well as words.
The app has surprisingly good recognition of my very messy handwriting. The translated text appears above the paragraph so you can proof as you go. If you spot a mistake you can scribble on top of the word to fix it. Sometimes dotting an" i" will fix a problem.
If overwriting doesnt work, you can erase and redo with a line through a phrase that is a total mess, or by blacking in over whatever your want deleted.
There are other commands such as inserting spaces, changing text style, stuff like that. Mostly secondary, if you ask me. Paper isn’t full of bells and whistles after all..
What Nebo does have is "convert to text" which means that when I 'm done, there is a text document ready to go. No transcribing.
So here I am writing in "pencil" on an infinite "page" of lined white "paper" in the morning. When I'm done, I save the file to my cloud storage where it takes up no space and is there wherever I am if I need it.
When you write with the Apple Pencil on the lines, Nebo also shows you the printed text above it.