Archive for the ‘Handwriting Recognition’ Category

Some prospective iPad users have made the comment that you can get a stylus for capacitive touch screens, and that’s true. You can. The experience however appears a bit underwhelming – like drawing with a crayon.

Take a look at the following video from a long time Tablet PC user in Malaysia who compares the resistive touch screen on the Fujitsu UH900 to the capacitive touch screen on the Lenovo S10. During the video he shows:

• Writing with a stylus pen on the resistive touch screen – good experience on the fast and small UH900, although not quite as good as active digitizer
• Writing with finger on the the capacitive touch screen – no leverage, very hard to sustain for longer than a few seconds
• Writing with a pogo stick on a capacitive touch screen – like using a crayon.

Fast forward to about 6:30 to see the pogo stick (crayon) in action.

From this video you will see that a capacitive touch screen is fairly useless for pen-like or fine input – think sketching, drawing, note taking  and handwriting. To resolve that problem, Windows Tablet PC manufacturers include an active digitizer on their capacitive touch screen Tablets.

A commenter on our last post about handwriting recognition in Windows 7 asked if it only works in English. The answer from the Windows 7 MSDN blog is quite impressive, so we thought that we should post it.

Windows Vista handwriting recognizers are available for 12 languages, including

• USA English
• UK English – Yes, the English recognisers are actually different and localised
• German
• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• Dutch
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
• Japanese
• Korean

So that’s what is already available now.

We are planning to ship new and improved languages for Windows 7, including:

• Norwegian
• Swedish
• Finnish
• Danish
• Russian
• Polish

That is what’s coming with the release of Windows 7 – very soon…and the list continues to grow!

In view of our last post about the handwriting recognition improvements in Windows 7 you might be wondering how good windows handwriting recognition is…

As an experiment, I’ll tell you to the story of my handwriting got so bad in digital ink with Windows Vista and I’ll show you the recognition results below:

And here is the recognised text version…

I was born in South Australia but grew

up in Victoria. So I started learning

to write at primary school in Victoria. The Victorian Education Department at

the time decided to change the

writing style taught from printing to cursive script.

In grade four, we moved from

Victoria to South Australia where kids

had always been taught cursive. When

I turned up, they decided to

switch to painting… And so, my

handwriting became a hacked up version of print and cursive…

One error… not bad!