Kobo handwriting troubles with mathematical notation
I recently got my Kobo Elipsa 2E and it's better than I expected, especially the simplicity of OS and how well handwriting generally works were a surprise to me.
Given that its handwritten notes features are surprisingly capable, I've been trying to use it to take notes for learning physics but quite soon ran into an issue in trying to use the advanced notebook:
In physics, there's a notation where you can write dx/dt as an x with a dot above it (ẋ), adding more dots the more often you take the derivative w.r.t. time though you typically only need 2 max. The handwriting recognition for formulas does not know this notation however and therefore converts any attempts to stupid stuff instead.
Additionally, I quite frequently write sentences that also contain some "math symbols" such as δ or θ or even just mathematical expressions such as L(x). Formula fields would recognise these just fine but no such luck with regular text fields; it tries to make normal letters or words out of these.
The maths formula mode cannot be used for annotating equations either as it garbles words into symbol structures.
The fall-back would be to just use raw drawing plots but my handwriting is quite poor and I'd rather have text because that really works quite well otherwise. I could write text mode until I need a sentence with a symbol in it but I don't know ahead of time whether I'll need it and by the time I know, it's already too late and I'd need to write the entire sentence again inside a raw canvas.
Are there any solutions or potential workarounds to my problems?
Is it possible to make the formula recognition aware of this notation somehow? I'll likely need further such niche notations in the future too.
Is it perhaps possible to have sections of text (or even formulas) that contain small raw canvases which don't get converted to text? That would also be a nice escape hatch.
Is there an alternative note-taking app one could side-load that works better perhaps? The hardware is surprisingly capable as mentioned; these issues are purely in software.
Might try looking into how the Nebo app does math formulas. Iirc the Kobo handwriting recognition uses their SDK.
Thanks a bunch. I looked into it a bit more and it appears this SDK is called "MyScript" and it's documented surprisingly well on https://developer.myscript.com/doc/.
There appears to be an expression language of sorts for mathematical expressions from which resource files are generated in a custom binary format. Given other overscript expressions already exist, it ought to be possible to make it recognise ẋ too and it might actually be quite simple. Their system strikes me as quite solid actually.
If I can generate such a resource file, adding it to the Kobo should be trivial too because all I'd need to do is edit a plain-text config file to include my custom resource file and those are trivial to access on a Kobo.
https://developer.myscript.com/docs/interactive-ink/2.0/android/advanced/build-custom-resources/#grammar-resource
In my research I also came across this which suggests mathematical notation in normal text isn't possible:
https://developer-support.myscript.com/support/discussions/topics/16000031866
They do say that it's possible to at least add some expressions or symbols though and I've been thinking whether just adding e.g. the Greek language pack could be enough.
What I'd really need here is an expression to say "treat the following text as math expressions" for short in-line math expression declarations. Perhaps they even thought of that; I'll do more research.
This link shows what math the Nebo app supports, also the links at the bottom show how to convert a written math to text.
Maybe the Kobo supports it.
https://app-support.myscript.com/support/solutions/articles/16000084244-math-symbols-and-operators-recognized-by-nebo