Dane-Elec Zpen review

Converting handwriting into editable text is a tricky task for computers at the best of times, so we were sceptical about the Zpen.

It looks like an ordinary pen, and even takes standard mini ballpoint refills. But pen contains a tiny transmitter that communicates with a small receiver that clips to the top of the sheet of paper you're writing on. This plugs into a USB port on your PC. Once activated, it saves everything you write as a continuous document, starting a new 'page' every time you clip it to a new sheet.

All the software you need to view, edit and export the resulting files comes stored in the receiver's own memory. The Pen and Ink Viewer comes in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X versions. Handwriting recognition isn't included in this program, but you can export files from it as PDFs which in turn can be run through separate software to convert your scrawls to text files. Windows users get MyScriptNotes, an ICR (intelligent character recognition) program with multilingual capabilities that can export converted text in various formats, including .txt and Microsoft .doc, and entire pages in graphical formats such as TIFF and JPEG. You can train the software to improve its ability to recognise your writing, but this is a rather time-consuming process that requires you to write out a lot of preset text.

It seems a missed opportunity that the software has to convert your handwriting just from a page image; recording and interpreting the direction of your pen strokes could have enabled greater accuracy. Even so, the software understood our handwriting better than any other program we've tried. For most members of the Buyer team, it managed to get at least 75% correct when we wrote neatly, but didn't cope too well with the imperfections that creep into most people's script when writing quickly. Still, correcting even a patchy text file was a lot quicker than transcribing a large amount of handwritten notes manually.

We found the Zpen most useful for capturing diagrams, mind maps and flow charts as we scribbled them out. This saved a lot of laborious scanning or drawing in a graphics program, and the handwritten text in our charts was usefully converted into an editable form.