Abstract: The invention is a portable data entry device that allows a user to record hand written material on paper using standard writing tools while simultaneously recording an electronic copy of the written material for subsequent processing and storage on suitable data processing and storage devices. The inventive device includes data processing software which performs an initial analysis of the electronically recorded hand writing and encodes non-ambiguous characters into a compressed character encoding format and stores the encoded data along with the remaining ambiguous character data in local storage memory. The encoded non-ambiguous character data is subsequently transmitted along with the remaining ambiguous character data to a base data processing device for further character recognition data processing.