Symptoms
The scan finishes but the text is significantly wrong; or SandDune reports it found no readable text and nothing is saved.
Possible causes
- Photo quality — dim light, blur, strong shadow across the page, or the page photographed at a steep angle. This is the cause in most cases; the AI reads what the camera captured.
- The page really has little machine-readable text — a drawing, a mind-map of single words, very faint pencil.
- Genuinely hard handwriting moments — heavily decorated lettering, dense corrections and margin inserts, text written over other text.
How to fix
- Retake the photo. Even daylight, page flat, camera parallel to the paper, page filling the frame. This one step fixes the majority of bad transcriptions. (A fresh Transcribe run uses another unit from your allowance — see Usage limits.)
- For scattered errors, don't re-transcribe — edit. Tap the wrong line in Live Highlights and fix the word; it's faster than a re-run and costs nothing.
- For "no text found": confirm the photo is the page you meant (not a blank verso), and that the writing has reasonable contrast. Nothing was saved and no note was created, so just try again with a better shot.
When to contact support
If clearly legible handwriting in a good, bright, flat photo keeps transcribing badly, we genuinely want to see it — transcription quality is something we measure continuously. Email support@sanddune.ai, attach the photo, and tell us what it should have said.