I’m more amused by Jake writing his stories on a PADD with a stylus, but you see it and it’s all printed text.
Yeah, but you never see the handwriting part. Like he’s writing on it and it’s doing handwriting to text, but the handwriting is not on the screen, which just seems like a bad interface.
This is a thing that existed even when DS9 was being filmed; taking handwriting and converting it to printed fonts? It wasn’t as on the fly IRL, but by the 24th century I’m sure it would be perfect where you could write by hand and instantly have it transformed into print.
What if a piece of consumer tech from the mid 90s helped explain? The Apple Newton brought offline handwriting recognition into the public perception and it was thought of as the Next Big Thing like AI or crypto. Inputs were all the rage in the 90s and handwriting recognition fell out of favor when speech to text software was released in the later half of the 90s.
Trek writers were trying to be forward thinking, and maybe there will be a handwriting resurgence that sees a maturation of the OCR tech, but for now it was a nice quiet piece of trivia that will be lost to time.
Production reason: without a stylus it looks like he’s reading, not writing. Without one, dialogue like “I’m writing a book” would come across as lying, which can completely change a scene for the worse.
In-universe lore reason: Jake is a romantic and probably feels that the more tactile approach is better for his creative process.
