Scan a page from a paper notebook and the handwriting becomes searchable text on your laptop. The Companion reads the page with the phone's own on-device text recognition, so the words you wrote by hand end up findable in search without you retyping a line. The recognized text is sealed before it ever leaves your phone, and the photo of the page travels to your laptop over an encrypted connection, deleted from the relay the moment your laptop picks it up.
Plenty of real lab notes still start on paper, a quick calculation, a plate map, a scribbled observation while the timer runs. Those pages are useful only if you can find them again, and a photo of handwriting is not searchable. Scanning closes that gap. You scan the page, the phone reads the handwriting on the device, and the laptop stores the recognized text next to the image so a search for a primer name or a date turns it up.
The native document scanner detects the page edges and cleans the scan before recognition runs.
Scan a page
Tap Scan a handwritten note on the Notebook tab and hold the phone over the page. The native document scanner detects the page edges, rectifies the perspective, and cleans the image, so a photo taken at an angle comes out flat and legible.
The phone runs on-device text recognition on the cleaned scan to extract the words. On iOS this is Apple Vision; on Android it is ML Kit. Either way the recognition happens on the phone, not on a server. The OCR result travels as its own sealed command, independent of the image upload, so the two never block each other.
After the scan queues, the Notebook Chooser opens exactly as it does for a photo capture. Pick the experiment tab (Lab Notes or Results), a note, or another notebook. Choosing nothing leaves the scan in your laptop inbox. The OCR sidecar follows the image to the same destination.
What lands on the laptop
When the laptop receives a scan, it stores the image and writes the recognized text into a small companion file next to it, an {image}.ocr.json sidecar. The OCR arrives as a separate sealed ocr-sidecar command keyed to the image's capture ID, so the relay carries it without being able to read it, and the sidecar is written wherever the image lands (inbox, experiment, or note). Because the text lands in the sidecar, it is indexed by search right away, and a query for something you wrote by hand finds the scanned page immediately.
Searchable handwriting connects the paper half of your work to the digital half. Once a scanned page is indexed, it shows up in search right alongside your typed notes, so where a note started, on paper or on the keyboard, stops mattering for finding it again.