There is no way (that I know of) to pass a note into a shortcut. There is no “note” type, so “text” is the closest thing.

You may or may not want to do this, as the shortcut will show up for the sharing sheets in other apps where it is not applicable. I did this so I would not have to leave the Notes App if I wanted to convert a note. Note that I specified that the shortcut show up on the sharing sheet for text. See the picture for the details pane (get to this by tapping the three dots next to the shortcut name).

Start up the Shortcuts app and create a new blank short cut (I called mine “Note to text”).

Here are the steps to run on the iPad to set things up, I don’t know if these functions are in iOS 12 (they may be), so you may need to wait for the rollout of iPadOS if you don’t want to try the beta. At the time of this post I’m using the iPadOS 13 beta.

It turns out, Apple Notes can make the converted text available on the iPad (and likly the iPhone, but I haven’t tried that) if you do some work and use the Shortcuts app that comes with the iOS. There is an iOS App that claims to do handwriting conversion from scanned documents, but that did not work well with PDF files made from Notes. There are plenty of for fee online conversion services in the cloud and they all seem expensive. I had been looking for a way to do this conversion. But in this case I want to do the conversion after the fact and from an Apple Note, not a Nebo note (I don’t keep notes in Nebo). There are applications that do real time conversion of handwriting into text Nebo being a great example. I really don’t want them to have to read my handwriting, so plain text is ideal. My use case is sometimes I need to share notes with other people. I would, however, like to have access to the full converted text. The text is there, though, as it is used when you search for notes. Apple Notes, behind the scenes, converts the handwriting into text, but aside for the note title you do not see any of that conversion. I do a lot of note taking with the pencil and handwriting, because I find that’s a very fast way for me to get things down. There are many note taking applications out there for Mac/iOS and while Apple Notes may not be the best, the price is right (free), it syncs with all of my Apple devices - MacBook, iPad, and iPhone (sometimes the sync fails in frustrating ways), and it nicely integrates with the Apple Pencil on my iPad. I use Apple Notes for all my note taking.

Handwriting note app for mac