Open beta — free for student testers
Note taking apps for students. The one that reads handwriting.
Search “note taking apps” and you get the same shortlist of typing-first tools. They are excellent—if you are typing. If your notes are already on paper, the app you choose does nothing for you until those words are in the machine. PageMark is that step: photograph the page, get clean text back. It’s in open beta right now, which means everything is free while we tune it on real student handwriting—yours.
The gap in most note taking apps
The apps students usually compare—Apple Notes, Google Keep, OneNote, Notion, Evernote, Goodnotes—all start from an empty page you type or write into. None of them look at a photo of the notebook you already filled in class. So the paper half of a student’s week still gets retyped by hand, or never digitized at all.
How it fits a student week
- Photograph your pages after the lecture—one page or a whole week’s worth at once.
- PageMark straightens the page, lifts shadows off the background, and reads every line.
- Structure survives: headings, bullet lists, to-do checkboxes, quotes, and hand-drawn tables come out as real Markdown, not a wall of text.
- Words the reader wasn’t sure about are highlighted, so you only check what needs checking.
- Copy it, download a
.mdfile, or grab everything as a zip—then paste it into whichever note taking app you actually keep.
Common questions
- What is the best note taking app for students?
- It depends where your notes start. If you type in class, the built-in apps are hard to beat and usually already on your device. If you write by hand, you need a way to get those pages into text first—that’s the job PageMark does, and it hands off to any app afterwards because Markdown is plain text.
- What are the best free note taking apps?
- Several popular note taking apps have free plans, and the built-in ones on your phone or laptop cost nothing. All of them assume typing. PageMark is free to open with no account and covers the part they don’t: turning a handwritten page into editable text.
- What is the best note taking app for college students?
- For most students the honest answer is a pair, not one app: something to type and store notes in, plus something that reads the pages you wrote by hand. PageMark is the second half, and it labels each note with your course so files sort themselves.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes—it was designed phone-first, with a camera button and a one-handed layout, plus dark mode for late libraries.
- Do I need Obsidian?
- No. The output is plain Markdown that pastes anywhere. If you do use Obsidian, the files are ready for it: frontmatter, tags, wiki-links, and callouts.
Be one of our beta testers.
Scan one real page of tonight’s notes, check the words it flags, and see if it earns a place in your week. Free while in beta, no account, nothing to install.
Start the beta testFound something it misread? Tell us directly:
Writing in cursive? See how it reads cursive.