Guide

Getting handwriting into GoodNotes and Notability

By Ayush NautiyalUpdated

A recurring request: typed notes on a laptop, but the notes themselves live in GoodNotes on an iPad, and typed text in a handwriting app looks out of place next to everything else.

The converter runs in Safari on iPadOS, so you can do the whole thing on the tablet. It is more comfortable on a laptop and then moved across. Both work.

The short version

Export as PNG, then import the images as pages. Not PDF, in most cases. The reasons are below.

Doing it on the iPad directly

  1. Open the converter in Safari on the iPad.
  2. Paste your text. The layout collapses to a single column on a tablet; the controls sit under the preview rather than beside it.
  3. Set page size to match your GoodNotes template. A4 if your notebooks are A4, Letter if they are Letter. This matters more than it does for printing, because a mismatch leaves you with a page that does not fill the canvas.
  4. Export PNG. One page downloads to Files directly. More than one comes as a ZIP, which Files will unpack if you tap it.
  5. In GoodNotes, open the notebook, then + → Import → pick the images.

Each image becomes its own page.

Doing it on a laptop first

Same steps, then move the files over. AirDrop is fastest. iCloud Drive, Google Drive and Dropbox all work and all keep the filenames, which matters because the pages are numbered page-01, page-02 and so on specifically so they sort correctly.

If you import a ZIP’s contents and the pages arrive out of order, the usual cause is a transfer that stripped the names. Re-sort by name before importing.

PNG or PDF

PNG is right most of the time. GoodNotes treats each image as a page, the quality is high (pages render at 2.5×), and the result behaves exactly like a page you scanned in.

PDF is right when the document is long. Importing a 40-page PDF is one operation; importing 40 PNGs is 40 files and GoodNotes will think about it for a while. PDF also keeps the real page dimensions, so an A4 PDF lands as an A4 page.

JPEG only if storage is tight. The compression shows up as a faint halo around letter edges, which is the one artefact that makes a handwritten page look processed.

Notability

Notability’s import is slightly different. Import accepts PDF and images, but images come in as objects placed on a note rather than as pages of their own. For page-per-sheet behaviour, use PDF.

Notability also lets you drop an image straight onto an existing note, which is useful if you want converted text alongside your own handwriting rather than replacing it.

Apple Notes

Drag or share the PNG into a note and it embeds as an image. Apple Notes has no page concept, so a long document becomes a long scroll of images.

One handy side effect: Live Text will read the handwriting back out of the image, with reasonable accuracy on the neater styles and poor accuracy on the messier ones. Worth knowing if you want the text searchable again later.

What you cannot do

The imported handwriting is an image. It is not strokes.

That means the eraser will not remove a word, GoodNotes’ lasso cannot select and move a sentence, and the app’s handwriting recognition sees a picture rather than ink. You can draw on top of it, highlight it, annotate it, and erase parts of it the way you would erase part of any image.

If you need to change the words, change them in the converter and re-export. This is why it is worth getting the pagination right before you import rather than after.

Settings that suit a tablet screen

A few things behave differently on a backlit screen than they do on paper.

Push the handwriting size up. 27 px is tuned for print. On a tablet, especially if you are also zooming, 30 to 34 reads better.

Blue over black. Black ink on a bright white render has more contrast on screen than it does on paper, and it can look harsh. Blue is softer.

Use Clean finish, not Scanned. The scanned wash greys the page, and a grey page next to GoodNotes’ white template looks dirty rather than realistic. Scanned is for documents going out; Clean is for documents staying in an app.

Match the paper to your template. If your GoodNotes notebook is already ruled, importing ruled pages gives you two sets of lines that will not align. Either use Plain in the converter, or use a blank template in GoodNotes and let the converter supply the ruling. The second option looks better.

Rendering more than one style

A thing worth knowing for anyone making worksheets: you can select part of the text and apply a different handwriting style to just that range. Question in one hand, answer in another, on the same page, in one export. The control is the style grid; select text first, then click a style.