As useful as typing up handwritten cards is, this is risky for me because I find tech a constant distraction.
I’d like to be able to write cards as I study, and then import them into Anki, in bulk, with minimal interaction, in an efficient workflow. I don’t want to spend my time interacting with tech; I want to spend my time studying, but having the cards on my phone for on the train is still useful over handwritten notes.
There are plenty of apps for getting HANDWRITTEN notes into text these days. Here’s an example: com.appsuite.handwriting.to.text
What written format could I create to easily import this into Anki?
As an aside, a simpler thing to do could be to just use the Anki app directly to take pictures of notes, and just leave them as an unsearchable mess. This isn’t my first choice, but I’ll do it if I have to. This is because such photos take up a lot of storage space. Personally, I found that when storage gets to a few GB, any minor problems with ankisync/database/media missyncs can quickly because so unwieldy to diagnose over slow bandwidth, that I have to abandon them.
Dude, this is a very niche use case. But if all your cards are front back based (i.e. simple cards):
Perform OCR on images of front/back and get that text exported/entered into a CSV file with appropriate front back column fields and then import that CSV into anki. You will have to invest some time into tooling, but once done, should last indefinitely.
If on a *nix system, look into ocrmypdf. Copy and paste recognized text into an open excel document. Export that excel document into CSV format specified by anki manual. Import into Anki. Done.
Thanks!
But sadly, Tesseract can’t do handwriting. I believe Opensource OCR can’t do handwriting. I guess this might be because no one has submitted AI training data for any potential project 
Thus, handwriting can’t be processed locally with privacy and all has to go through a cloud service that has the AI trained service.
Good idea though. I’ll investigate AI data sources for this.
Just to add another thread of conversation to my last reply: This shouldn’t be niche. Handwriting improves memory retention. From this POV, everyone should be using longhand.
(forum won’t let me link to a citation)
Haha well thousands have ideas of what the world should be. Unfortunately it is not human nature to always do what is best, but rather what is most convenient. As such, unless anyone else here has better data, it is my impression that among my class of students no one is handwriting cards. I’d expect demand for such a feature to be pretty low. Not putting your idea down … you might be right regarding retention. But if it’s gonna go into anki anyways, might as well type it up. Plus computers have all sorts of special formatting options, etc.
The hardest part of your idea is just the OCR part. The rest is pretty straightforward regarding csv, etc. But OCR would be way beyond the scope of a project like this, so it would be something only someone willing to write an add-on could hope to support.
I’m using the “Handwriting to Text” app. However, it doesn’t recognise new lines very well.
What can I put in my handwriting to improve the formatting?
I don’t need any fancy formatting. I just need the basic format of
Q: This is question 1.
A: This is the answer 1.
Q2: This is question 2.
A2: This is the answer 2, not part of question 1!