The Whitelines System

[dcwaites]

I recently bought some Whitelines stationery, and have been playing with it, the special smart-phone app, and their downloadable templates.

 

The Whitelines system consists of several parts – the special pattern, the stationery, the Whitelines-Link app and the printable templates.

 

The special pattern is designed to allow you to write on the paper without the distraction of black lines across the paper. You get the benefit of writing on blank paper with a ruled guide under the paper, without having to fiddle with the guide sheet.

The pattern consists of a grey background with white lines, hence the name of the product. When you write, the white lines guide your writing, and the grey background then ‘disappears’ behind your writing.

 

As well as the standard lined pattern, there are grid squares and some specialised patterns such as perspective guides.

The stationery products have one of the various Whitelines patterns printed on them, and are relatively inexpensive. It is not surprising, then, that the paper is not the best in the world, but even so, it is a bit disappointing. You get a degree of show-through, and occasionally bleeding, with almost all inks, except for a small number of especially well-behaved inks. These include Dr Ph Martin’s Ocean pigmented inks, Blackstone Barrister Black, Sailor Kiwaguro Black and that perennial standard - Noodler’s (bulletproof) Black, as well as Noodler’s Kung Te-Cheng. I have yet to see any noticeable show-through or bleeding with any of these inks on Whitelines stationery.

The problem with the show-through/bleeding is that it takes away from the basic concept of Whitelines – being able to write without distraction. Even if the show-through is only minimal, the fact that it is visible is distracting. It would be much nicer with better paper.

Another annoying thing I have noticed is that the problem seems to be rather inconsistent. My first Whitelines purchase was a small wire-bound flip notebook, and it was very good with a number of inks. On the basis of that, I then purchased a few more products, which have not been nearly as good.

The Whitelines-Link app is a smart, dedicated app for smart-phones with a camera. The idea is to take a photo of the page, remove the grey background by adjusting the colour balance and giving you an image of your writing or drawing on a white background.

The really clever part of all this is the set of four icons, one in each corner. The app recognises these and uses them to select the writing area and ‘square up’ the image. When it is happy, it automatically takes the photo. The app then changes the colour balance to remove the grey background. For FPNers, however, this app doesn’t preserve the colour fidelity of your inks. In removing the grey, the colour changes to a darker hue. Then the app tends to merge the colours a bit, so several different blues will look the same. However, the app is not designed to produce a faithful replica of what’s on the paper. It produces a digitised image that can be stored in the cloud, and if everything works well, can even be made searchable.

If you put your images up on Evernote, then the Evernote servers can use OCR technology to make your handwritten documents searchable. It won’t turn them into plain text, but if you have written neatly enough, the system can identify and find words that you have written. Depending on the size and readability of your handwriting, then printing may be easier for the system to cope with.

The printable templates are the final part of the system. These are available from the Whitelines website, come in A4 and A5 sizes, and in lined or grid squares. Downloading and printing these on your own paper allows you to try out the system for free.

You will need to print using Best Quality, but because you are only printing a thin, grey pattern, you don’t end up using very much ink. You may need to adjust the degree of darkness to get a pattern that you like.

In Summary, the concept is interesting, writing on a light grey background with white lines. When I print my own lined paper, I tend to use light blue or grey lines on a white background. It would be interesting to see which is the least distracting.

The almost universal show-through / minor bleeding on the Whitelines stationery is a disappointment. I have only been able to find a few inks that behave without bleeding through. These include Noodler’s Black and Kung Te-Cheng, Pelikan 4001 Royal Blue and vintage Parker Quink Blue-Black with Solv-X, all in fine-nibbed pens, as well as Dr Ph Martin’s pigmented inks, Sailor Kiwaguro and Blackstone Barrister Black.

The Whitelines-Link app is an interesting compromise. It is simple to use and is designed to save space on digital storage. To this end, both its colour space depth and resolution are limited. These are design considerations rather than faults or limitations.

 

 

 

This is a small Whitelines notebook. You can see the grey background (sorry about the Moiré pattern) with the white lines, the four icons in the corners, and the ticked Evernote box.

 

 

 

This is what the Whitelines-Link app produces, stores, and in this case, puts up on Evernote. Compare the colours of the inks (Kung Te-Cheng for the first paragraph, and Platinum Pigmented Blue for the rest) in the first scan, and what the app does to them.

 

 

 

This is what it looks like in Evernote, with searching. Note that it found the two cursive 'special', but not the neatly printed 'Special'. Go figure...

 

 

 

This final page shows you the back of the first image, with the show-through/bleeding.

Edited August 13, 2016 by dcwaites

[Pickwick]

From your description, that seems a lot of work, and I would be interested to learn what the benefits are from using this application especially if anyone is doing a lot of writing and like to use both sides of paper which does not allow ink to bleed through.

 

Bearing in mind that printing from templates is hardly free given the high cost of printing ink is where printer manufacturers make what some of us deem a very high profit! And if anyone does a lot of writing will need to keep this in mind.

 

I write a considerable number of letters, and to keep my writing consistently straight use a roller ruler and pencil drawing very light lines on the paper which hardly takes any time at all. After writing a page the pencil lines can hardly be seen.