All this boils down to storing digital data on paper. This is also called paper data storage. Character-based encodingsTL;DR; OCR digital data is a very hard problem, one can get 2.5 kilobytes per A4 page that is decodable afterwards, see “How to get perfect OCR for digital data?”. Long term storageOnce you have some kind of encoded data, we store on paper. Hand writing digital dataNot all encodings are appropriate for handwriting digital data.