Spilled Ink

I admit it. I liked Graffiti on the Palm Pilot. I thought it was easy to learn and faster than hunt and peck on a tiny keyboard. But for one reason and another, tiny keyboards became the norm. I always harbored a desire to communicate with my computer in a more comfortable fashion. Voice control is awesome, but it's not great when there are other people around. Touch screens are nice, when you don't have to input text, but they are awful at text.

Enter handwriting recognition. After some looking around, the best seemed to be on Windows 7. So, into our Mac and Linux household I brought a Windows 7 netbook with a resistive touch screen. An upgrade to Windows Home Premium was required, but it has what I want: a more natural way to input text.

A few things that surprised me: recognition seems better with either fully cursive writing or fully printed writing. I seems to have a hard time with a mix of the two. While retraining my hands for full cursive, I realized that oneof the letters that breaks up my flow is the letter "t". When writing on paper. I will stop whatever I'm writing to cross the tee. I think this is so I don't forget to go back and do it. This made me remember a peculiarity in the way my paternal grandmother wrote her words. She brought the cross of the tee up from the bottom of the stroke, then attached that to the next letter. After seeing that the software could handle that, I switched to that style on the computer. This makes cursive much faster for me.

Some other things to note is that it's not perfect, but it will often autocorrect to what you mean. For example, it correctly got the text "can you read this" even though the intermediate text was wrong.

And, although it's not local handwriting recognition, Evernote will scan your hand written notes and makes them searchable.

Lastly, some other methods of input I thought of were shorthand and Morse code, neither of which I know. There are Morse input programs for smart phones and a few for PCs.

There are a few cases where handwriting is terrible. Entering passwords is the first to come to mind. And punctuation is not great either, neither are most URLs, but it does what I wanted. It lets me use a tablet PC without hunting and pecking on a tiny keyboard.