Anoto pens, Moleskine notebooks and OSX
Anoto
If you’ve never heard of it before, Anoto is a company with a clever piece of technology that enables digital note taking. It starts with a special paper printed with a pattern of tiny (0.1 mm) dots on it. The pattern is based on a grid, but each dot is slightly off centre of from the grid intersections:

They then have an algorithm that can produce squares of this grid, where each square is 2×2 mm and has 36 dots on it, each with a unique pattern. The total surface area they can cover with this unique pattern is 1.8 million square miles.
Then they have a pen, which has a miniature camera built into it that takes 50 or so photographs of the nearby dots every second. From that the pen can tell exactly where you are, where your stroke was going and where it has gone, basically recording everything you write. Most importantly, if you raise the pen and then lower it to the paper, it can tell immediately where it is.
The other clever thing about this pen is the ink. The dots themselves are printed in black and are visible in the infrared (IR) portion of the spectrum, which is how the camera sees them. But in order to ensure that the ink you write does not obscure the dots they have developed IR transparent ink.
That’s the technology, which is easy enough but Anoto then complicate things drastically by their business model and appalling web site. They don’t sell anything direct but work through partners, on whom they provide precious little information. These partners then develop products and, in many cases, buy a section of the virtual Anoto paper to use for their applications.
Most of these partners have developed “business applications” such as pre-printed forms for recording medical questionnaires. All very interesting I’m sure, but no use to me and by definition a niche product.
Moleskine notebooks
This brings me onto to Moleskine notebooks. I love these. They have a way of making me feel I can create anything and anything I do write looks good.
But that’s not enough. I want a digital Moleskine, or something very similar so I get the same feeling of productivity and yet have it all digitally recorded.
OSX and sharing my data
The final thing I want is a way of getting the data off the pen onto my Mac and from there outputting it to my note taking program (SOHO Notes) or a wiki (Confluence) or even to ebook format.
The requirements
It appears that most of the Anoto partners have inherited the same “give your customer only half the information” attitude to web sites as Anoto so finding out exactly how it all fits together was painful to say the least. Even now I still don’t have some crucial answers.
Just to be clear, the three things I am after are:
- An Anoto-enabled pen.
- OSX software to talk to the pen above that outputs in a way I can actually use. It would be nice if it did character recognition as well but I guess that is pushing it.
- An Anoto printed notebook that feels like a Moleskine.
I’ve found the last one quite easily, made by Livescribe. They also seem to make great pens, complete with built-in audio recording and and OLED display. Unfortunately they don’t make OSX software though they are developing some. Even with their Windows software I can’t tell what formats you can output to, they say so little about it. Sigh.
I’ve also come across two separate providers of OSX software, Pen-It and Paperium. The Paperium software claims to output in lots of ways. Both of these come with their own pens to link to their software, which gives me my first major question:
Can any Anoto-enabled pen work with any pen software or is software unique to a specific pen and vice versa?
Pen-It, who resell the Maxell pen make it clear their software only works with that pen and they don’t sell it differently. Given just how little information there is on their web site I am amazed that nugget slipped through.
If the answer is ‘no’ across the board then I’ll have to buy the Paperium pen.
The next question is:
Will any pen work any Anoto paper product?
Again, I would have hoped this answer is yes but Pen-It again say their pen doesn’t.
Until I get that one answered I won’t be able to buy anything!
The products
To save you having to search for hours like I did, here is a roughly useful set of links.
Pens:
- Maxell DP-201. This is also branded as Pen-It (not the same as the people above). They only sell through the channel but there appear to be plenty of people who resell it.
- Nokia SU-27W. They do sell direct and lots of others sell it. This is the latest version of the discontinued Nokia SU-1B.
- Destiny io. This was formerly the Logitech io pen (and io2) but they sold the business. This is possibly the least informative web site I have ever come across.
- Magicomm g303. I’m not sure this is actually an Anoto-enabled pen. They are listed as a partner by Anoto but they don’t mention anything about it.
- Livescribe Pulse. This is easily the pen with the highest features and can also come in a 2GB variant.
- Paperium. I’m pretty sure this pen is just another pen rebadged but I haven’t looked at the pictures closely enough to be sure.
- Flypen”. This is a version especially for kids
Paper:
- Oxford easy book. These notebooks appear everywhere and again are sold through resellers not direct.
- Orignote. These are supplied by Magicomm and again I don’t know if these are Anoto-enabled or not.
- Livescribe notebooks. These are the nice ones that look like Moleskine books.
- Paperium notebooks. Again these are probably rebadged but I can’t tell.
And finally …
Confused? I certainly am.

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