Photographing a handwritten page
Point your phone at a paper journal and Dayspring turns it into text you can check before it's saved.
This applies to iPhone and iPad.
If you keep a paper journal as well, you can bring a page across without typing it out.
Tap the scan button in the bar above the keyboard, photograph the page, and Dayspring reads the handwriting into text.
How it goes
- Tap scan. The camera opens.
- Photograph the page. Add more shots for a long entry — up to 8 pages in one go.
- Wait a moment while it’s read.
- Check the draft. It’s shown to you as editable text before anything is saved.
- Insert it where your cursor is.
It transcribes, it doesn’t tidy
The draft is what you wrote, as you wrote it — including the bits that don’t scan well and the sentence you abandoned halfway. Nothing is smoothed out, improved, or rephrased.
That’s the point. A tidied-up version of your journal isn’t your journal.
Which is also why step 4 exists: handwriting is hard, and you should see what it made of yours before it becomes part of your record.
Getting a better read
- Flat page, no curl at the spine.
- Even light. Avoid your own shadow across the page.
- Get the whole page in frame rather than zooming in close.
Where the button is
Same place as the microphone — the bar above the on-screen keyboard. So this is an iPhone and iPad feature; there’s no equivalent in the Mac app.
Afterwards
Once inserted, the text is an ordinary entry. Any Bible references in it get noticed and reach the Lamp exactly as if you’d typed them — which means a paper journal you photograph over a few evenings joins the rest of your history properly.
Give it the right date via Change date in the entry menu, so it lands where it belongs rather than today.