A handwriting note is a notebook of ruled pages you write on with an Apple Pencil, a stylus or a finger. It sits in your folders like any other note, syncs like any other note, and the words on it are read back into text so search and the AI can use them.
Turning it on
Handwriting notes are off until you switch them on, so a keyboard only workspace never meets them. Open Settings, choose Notes and turn on Handwriting notes. On desktop the same switch is at the bottom of the Notes tab.
If you told the onboarding you are a student, it is already on and new notes are handwriting notes. Researchers, teachers and designers get it on with typed notes as the default. Everyone else starts with it off.
Creating one
With the switch on, a second setting appears: New note creates, which is Text or Handwriting. The new note button makes that type, and so does Cmd N on desktop. The other type is always one step away: long press the new note button on mobile, or open its menu on desktop, and the type the button is not making is the first item.
A notebook that already exists opens whatever the switch says, so turning the feature off later hides the way to make one without hiding the ones you have.
The screen
The note's name sits in the middle of the header on mobile, and a tap on it renames the notebook. On desktop renaming is the first item in the note menu. Under the header is the tool bar, and under that the pages, lying on a grey desk with a gap between them.
The page counter in the bottom corner reads the page you are on out of how many there are. Tap it to open the page navigator, a grid of thumbnails: tap a page to jump to it, use the trash on a thumbnail to delete it, and the last tile adds a page. A notebook holds up to a hundred pages. Zoom sits beside the counter on mobile and in the opposite corner on desktop.
The tools
One bar, in this order: hand, select, pen, highlighter, eraser, shapes, text and picture, then undo and redo at the far end.
- Hand scrolls and pans. Any touch that lands off the paper pans too, whichever tool is in hand.
- Select is a lasso. While it holds something, the bar offers duplicate, rotate, beautify, delete and a colour disc that recolours what is held. Beautify tidies handwritten strokes.
- Pen has four brushes, ballpoint, fountain, brush and pencil, plus smoothing and a switch that turns a roughly drawn shape into a clean one.
- Highlighter draws a wide translucent band in a colour of its own.
- Eraser rubs out whole strokes or just the part under it.
- Shapes gives rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, triangle, diamond, line and arrow, filled or outlined.
- Text puts a text box on the page, with a size, bold, italic and alignment.
- Picture adds a photo or an image to the page.
Tap the tool already in hand to open its card: its own settings first, then its thickness, then its colour. Each tool remembers its colour, so a blue pen and a yellow highlighter stay that way. The card closes on the next stroke.
Ink starts on a sheet and stays on it. A stroke that runs off the edge of a page is held to that page rather than crossing the gap onto the next one.
Pencil and palm
On an iPad, the first time Grape sees an Apple Pencil it turns on Draw with stylus only, so a hand resting on the glass leaves no marks and a finger only pans. The switch is in Settings under Notes, and in the notebook's own menu. It is a per device setting: an iPhone does not inherit it from the iPad.
On desktop
The same notebook opens in the desktop app with the same tools in the editor header, and you can keep writing on it with the mouse or a trackpad. There is no stylus setting and no handwriting recognition on desktop, which is why a notebook only ever written on there has no searchable words until a phone or an iPad opens it.
In focus mode a notebook fills the window, and its header stays with the drawing tools in it.
What a notebook does not have
A notebook has no version history and cannot be saved as a template, and find in note and find and replace have nothing to search. The AI can read it but never edits it, see Search your handwriting and ask the AI about it.