HOW TO Get speed writing with Scribble

Enter your text

If you can see a text field, you can Scribble in it. Here we’ve scrawled “Apple Park” into Apple’s Maps app, and as you can see it’s turned our scrawl into search criteria. This works in apps such as Safari and Messages too.

Convert the text

If you tap and hold on your handwritten text, you can select a word and then drag the selection handles to encompass some or all of your text. If you choose Copy As Text, iPadOS copies machine–readable text to the clipboard.

Detect the data

The data detectors work with handwritten text. If you write a phone number (without spaces — the detectors ignored us when we didn’t cut the gaps), you can tap on it to get context–aware phone number options.

Make a note

We think Scribble’s natural home is in Notes, where it’s ideal for jotting down ideas, commenting on things, and anything else you might use a normal pencil for. But Scribble has some additional tricks up its sleeve.

Use typed text

Here we’ve deleted our handwritten text and pasted the text we just copied to the clipboard in its place. As you can see, iPadOS has converted the words perfectly, although it hasn’t quite got the spacing we wanted.

State the date

The same data detection works with addresses and dates, although this is a bit trial and error: we find that dates work well when formatted as 12/10/20 but not December 10th 2020, but that may be down to our writing.