How to digitise handwritten notes and keep writing on paper

1. Create a notebook. In Axsuro, create one notebook per paper notebook, for example “Work” and “Personal”. An Axsuro Powerbook connects via the QR code on page i, but you don't need one.
2. Photograph your pages. In the Axsuro app, photograph one page after another, straight from above and in good light. Without internet, the photos stay on your phone and are sent later.
3. Upload older pages as a PDF. If you already scanned pages, upload the PDF in the web app at app.axsuro.com: up to 50 pages per file, each PDF page becomes one page.
4. Check and confirm. Axsuro reads every line, the date and the page number. Tasks, events and sketches wait for “Confirm”, and you correct a misread word with “Fix”.
5. Find and organise. Search with ⌘K, ask Ask or leaf through the book. A #project in a line gathers everything on one topic in one place.

You think differently on paper: no battery, no notifications, just you and the page. The trouble comes later. You need a phone number that was somewhere in March. You forgot the task on page 31. And the notebook is at home when you need it at the office.

Digitising your notes doesn't mean giving up paper. You keep writing as before and still have everything with you: searchable, in order, with tasks and events where you need them. What exactly happens to your handwriting along the way is explained in Convert handwriting to text.

A full notebook is best done in one go, page by page in the right order. Axsuro reads the page number or counts on, and it reads the date of the page. So the order holds, even if you photograph a hundred pages in one evening.

• Several pages in a row: in the app you photograph one page after another without confirming anything in between.
• Already scanned: upload PDFs of up to 50 pages in the web app, and split bigger scans into several files.
• Photos from your phone: JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC up to 15 MB each, several at once.

For full notebooks there is “Bring in an old notebook”: in the web app under Scans, many photos or PDFs at once, in the order of their file names, with an optional “Roughly when” (such as 2019–2020); in the app, “Old notebook” on the camera. Axsuro reads these archive pages in the background and guesses the date of each page: the date on the page, else that of the page before, else the range. Guessed dates are marked, and you can change them.

Archive pages count apart and once per account, never against the pages of the month: Free brings in 50, Plus 300, Pro 1,000, Business 1,000 per member. All plans are on Pricing.

Old todo: and cal: lines stay as they were written, “from the archive”: a task from 2019 is not a task today, so there is nothing to confirm. Search, Ask and “On this day” still find them. Pages you photograph one by one are read as usual and count towards the pages of the month.

Once a page is read, every line is searchable. ⌘K searches everything you wrote, plus tasks, events, notebooks and projects. Type “fair” and you see every page with that word on it.

If you no longer remember how you put something, ask in plain words. Ask understands what you mean, also with other words and across languages, and answers only from your notes, in the language of your question, with links to the pages:

• “When is the market?” – “Saturday at 9:00”, from cal: Sat 9:00 market on page 47.
• “Which book did I want to read?” – “The Hobbit”, also page 47.

Inside the book you can ask just that one notebook. How many questions a month your plan includes is on the pricing page.

Every notebook opens in Axsuro as a book, in page-number order. The pages are redrawn 1:1 in one of nine handwriting fonts, the one closest to your own hand. If you don't like it, pick another. It is not a font made from your own letters, but it reads like a page, not like a table.

• Turn pages by dragging, clicking, with the arrow keys or by swiping, as spreads on large screens.
• Tasks and events are live on the page: tick off a task and the book shows it too.
• An index of pages, projects, people and bookmarks.
• From Plus: highlights, sticky notes, bookmarks, printing and presenting.

There is more about notebooks in Axsuro on Digitise your notebook.

You hardly need to sort anything by hand. A few signs while you write are enough:

• Notebooks: one per paper notebook or per area of life. Free has 3, Plus and up unlimited.
• Projects: the first #Fair creates a project, and every later line with #Fair lands there, whichever notebook it is in.
• People: ? is the budget fixed @Lena becomes an open question for Lena. Everyone you mention gets a page with their tasks, questions and events.
• Your own markers: read: The Hobbit can land in your own reading list. You set your own words under Settings → Markers, Free has 3.

Digitised notes shouldn't be stuck in one app.

• Tasks and events sync both ways with Google Calendar and Google Tasks, Outlook and Microsoft To Do, and Todoist. Free connects one account, Plus and up all of them.
• Long text becomes a document with doc: or “Save as document”, which you export as PDF, Word or Markdown.
• From Plus, you export to Word, Markdown, Notion and Confluence.
• In every plan, Settings → Data & privacy lets you take everything as one file or delete your account.

Your pages are stored in Frankfurt, read in the EU, encrypted and never used to train AI models.

• How to convert handwriting to text (2026)
  How to convert handwriting to text: typing it up, Google Lens, a tablet or an app that reads whole pages. Pros, cons and tips for clean recognition.
• From paper to Google Calendar, Outlook and Todoist
  Sync a paper planner with Google Calendar: write cal: and todo:, take a photo, confirm. Axsuro syncs with Google, Outlook, Microsoft To Do and Todoist.
• Flashcards from handwritten notes
  Turn notes into flashcards: write q: and a: by hand, photograph the page, and Axsuro builds a deck per notebook with five boxes for spaced repetition.