How can handwriting or drawing be produced freehand and entered directly into a computer?

Answer 1

It depends on exactly what you're after. You options are really either a scanner or a graphics tablet.

With a scanner you could write or draw freehand onto a sheet of paper and scan it in. This will produce an image file on your computer, e.g. a JPG, GIF, BMP, etc. If you want the computer to "understand" your hand writing you would use your scanner's OCR software.

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and is where the computer guesses what the letters, numbers and characters are and tries to translate them into characters on your computer. Although OCR software these days is pretty respectable it still depends a lot on your handwriting.

A graphics tablet: imagine a mouse mat which you draw on with a magic pen. The computer reads your hand strokes with the pen across the mat and that is exactly what appears on the screen. Again, OCR software could be applied in this instance too.