Will, yes I think many of these issues are equally true of paper notebooks. Just that the same standards of legibility and comprehensibility are usually not applied. Also, to be frank, the interface remains better :-)

Yaroslav, its a good point, I hadn't considered NMR and I should look into this. We don't actually have NMR onsite here but I believe it is something we should have and presumably it wouldn't need incredibly high field instruments so wouldn't have to be very expensive. Will look into this.