📝 WriteWise

OCR-enhanced notetaking for the masses

WriteWise is a Flask-based web application that lets users create, edit, and organise rich-text documents in a simple, folder-based interface. Built with students and writers in mind, it also features image-to-text transcription to bridge the gap between physical and digital notes.

This project was developed as part of my A-Level Computer Science course in early 2025.

🚀 Features

• 🔐 User Authentication – Secure registration and login with password hashing.
• 🗂️ File Explorer – Create, manage and organise documents in folders.
• 🖋️ WYSIWYG Editor – Rich-text editing with formatting tools (bold, italics, colour, lists, etc.).
• 📷 Image Transcription – Upload images of text to convert them to editable HTML (powered by Tesseract OCR).
• ⚠️ XSS Protection – Editor sanitises pasted content to prevent script injection.

❗ Missing or Planned Features

Some features were planned but not fully implemented:

• 🔒 Document encryption (files are currently stored as plaintext)
• 📤 Export to file (PDF/Word)
• 🧠 Improved handwritten text recognition via neural networks or better OCR models
• 🖨️ Print preview layout
• 🎨 CSS (to improve the overall aesthetics of the website)

🛠 Installation

1. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/abubakar179/WriteWise.git
   cd writewise

2. Create virtual environment

   python -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate # or `venv\Scripts\activate` on Windows

3. Install dependencies

   pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Create SQLite database

   python3 create.py

5. PLEASE SET A SECRET KEY - generate a UUID and paste it into app.py

   app = Flask(__name__)
   app.secret_key = "INSERT KEY HERE"
   pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = r"C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe"

6. Install Tesseract The default path in app.py is the default Windows folder that Tesseract is stored. In order to install Tesseract, please use the binaries at https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract
7. Start Flask web server (By default, the app runs at http://0.0.0.0:5000/.)

   python3 app.py