The other notebook option is the Advanced Notebook. This notebook offers more powerful controls, graphics, and handwriting recognition.
I will say right up front that it is not yet ready for prime time. The power and potential is there, but the interface is buggy and exporting has serious flaws. Let’s start at the beginning.
Drawing and writing in the advanced notebook is mostly the same as the standard simple notebook. You have the same pen nib choices, an eraser, and undo & redo buttons. You can refer to my previous post above for details on those tools. The one difference I noticed was that the erase button on the stylus did not work. Instead, I needed to scribble over whatever it was that I wanted to erase. If there was an entire sentence that I wanted to erase, and it was part of a text block, the only way to get rid of it was to scribble carefully over just that one sentence. This was not optimal. With the erase button, one only needs to stroke once over the area and all vector graphics disappear. I am hoping Kobo enables the erase stylus button in a future firmware update.
There is another difference between the two notebooks. The Standard Notebook is paginated like an ebook. One can swipe back and forth through the notebook. The Advanced Notebook, on the other hand, is continually scrolling like a web page.
The … menu choices were different for the advanced notebook. They included insert drawing, insert diagram, insert math equation, and insert free-form section. I mostly experimented with the drawing block. I’ll need to go back and experiment with the other options later, though I did notice that with the diagram block, The Elipsa would smooth out the rough lines of the circles, rectangles, and arrows that I drew. It would also auto fill them with grays.
When any of those options are selected, a block is added at the bottom of the notebook. Here is an example of the drawing block:
This block acts just like a Standard Notebook has been inserted into your Advanced Notebook. Draw or write what you wish, then tap on it with your finger to access the resize controls. Once you enter this phase, it appears you can never edit the drawing again. However, once it is resized, you can drag it anywhere in the notebook and all previous elements will flow around it.
I made an abstract graphic and moved it to the top of my journal, and then later wanted diagonal text, which could only be input as a drawing.
Once you’ve written something, double tapping on it with your finger will cause it to be converted to text. Once you’ve converted it, you cannot return to the hand written version. Everything you write is considered a graphic element. It can be moved, but I can’t be resized. As you can see from example, I mixed convert a text with handwritten text and placed it around a drawing. It was extremely silly and difficult to do that. The problem with this first version of the advanced notebook is that the bounding boxes are too large so if two items overlap, they cannot occupy the same space. Also, adjusting elements to be centered or right justified is impossible the way the advance Notebooks are coded now. I experimented with extra characters to try and space things properly, but it was just a lot of work. Re-editing text is extremely difficult to do from the left and easier to do from the right.
To be honest, I had more fun with the standard notebook than I did with the advanced notebook. The design controls are just not up to snuff yet. If you’re used to a typical word processor that allows you to add graphics and move things around, you will find the advanced notebook primitive in comparison. Also, all the elements seem to align on grid points that are widely spaced. If you like things to look just so, then you will be frustrated with the advanced notebook.
The question is, what can it do well? The handwriting recognition is fantastic! That in itself makes the advanced notebooks worth investing some time in. If I wanted to have one graphic with text flowing around it, the advanced notebook would handle that just fine. It also has the added benefit of exporting to text everything that I’ve written. My simple notebook layout would’ve been perfect for the advanced notebook. I got myself into trouble because I wanted to see just how far I could push the layout controls. I think I have successfully created a notebook that is so far on the edge of what this advance notebook is capable of doing, that it initially caused failures when trying to export.
If exporting the text to email or another application is important, then the advanced notebook is the one you want to be working in. For example, I plan on creating an advanced notebook dedicated to my current WIP. That way I can export any ideas I jot down to be used in Scrivener.
Exporting is another area that is not quite there yet. For some reason, Kobo did not opt to allow PDF as an output option. That is likely because data is the focus of the Advanced Notebook whereas reproduction is the focus of the Simple Notebook. Export choices are text, Microsoft Word, and HTML.
Fortunately, the OCR abilities of the Elipsa are THE upside to exporting Advanced Notebooks. I do write neatly, but even my handwriting is unique to me and sometimes different from other standard letter forms, yet the Elipsa converted my text without errors.
Obviously, The text export will offer no graphics and no fancy letterforms. Everything is converted to text. Graphics are excluded. Since data is the purpose of the advanced Notebook, then this is as raw as it gets. If you’re taking notes in a meeting, all of your notes will be exported as text, and the stupid doodles will be left behind.
The Microsoft word export tries to reproduce the layout, though crudely, and also converts all letterforms to text. However, drawings are exported. That’s an upside if you want to share your doodles.
The HTML export was both fascinating, thrilling, and woefully disappointing. Let me first show you what the code looks like.
When Flynn was scanned to hangout with Tron, he probably looked a little like this. It’s amazing to me, but there are no attached graphics with the HTML export. All graphics and letter forms were converted to mathematical representations. That’s amazing. However, my notebooks layout was still too much for the HTML converter, though HTML did the best job of reproducing the layout. What’s impressive to me is that each handwritten word is converted into a data block so that they reflow properly when you view it in a different browser.
Overall, I really do appreciate the technology behind the Advanced Notebooks. I think kobo is onto something here that is going to be very exciting as they work out the bugs.
Hopefully, this review has shown you the strengths and weaknesses of the current notebooks. I’m still excited about them even with their flaws. A lot of people were down on the Elipsa because it wasn’t the brand new color eReader they were hoping for, or the Forma killer that they were planning on. I feel your frustration. The Elipsa is definitely a different product than a standard ereader. It’s targeting a different group of people—the creative & business professionals who don’t want the distractions of an iPad or laptop with them when they’re working are going to enjoy products like the reMarkable and the Kobo Elipsa. I’m looking forward to running it through its paces in the next few weeks.
Any questions? Thoughts? What do you think of the Elipsa notebooks?