Expanding the domain

Michael- I was wondering if you had considered doing handwriting recognition as its own stand alone product? Or if it is even possible?
I find the hand writing recognition built into the iPhone to be slow and awkward, plus now that I am used to Pleco speeds and accuracy I find the Apple hwr input to be mostly useless. I would love to be able to use the Pleco hwr for doing my text messages. Any possibility of that in the future? Or even just having an expanded reader where we could input text and then quick copy to the SMS messaging (better yet, send SMS messages from Pleco).

Thanks
Michael
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The document reader actually does have a very limited / buggy / experimental text editor function now that lets you take advantage of our handwriting recognizer; once we solve the problem of how to make handwriting recognition smooth when it's using a transparent background we plan to develop that editor a lot more aggressively.

You can try it out by turning on "Enable text editing" in the Reader panel in Settings - make sure to also turn off the "Auto-clip on copy" option near the top of the Reader panel, since due to a bug (fixed in our just-submitted bug-fix update) having that option on screws up the handwriting input system in the text editor.

There's no explicit support in there for creating / clipping documents, but it's a standard iPhone text editing control, so after you finish writing a paragraph you can select it and copy it to the pasteboard to stick it in in another app. Sending SMSes from inside Pleco (or any iPhone app other than SMS) is impossible, but we can certainly streamline the process of getting newly-edited documents into SMS, and we could also hook up a way to directly send email messages at least.
 
mikelove said:
The document reader actually does have a very limited / buggy / experimental text editor function now that lets you take advantage of our handwriting recognizer; once we solve the problem of how to make handwriting recognition smooth when it's using a transparent background we plan to develop that editor a lot more aggressively.

You can try it out by turning on "Enable text editing" in the Reader panel in Settings - make sure to also turn off the "Auto-clip on copy" option near the top of the Reader panel, since due to a bug (fixed in our just-submitted bug-fix update) having that option on screws up the handwriting input system in the text editor.

There's no explicit support in there for creating / clipping documents, but it's a standard iPhone text editing control, so after you finish writing a paragraph you can select it and copy it to the pasteboard to stick it in in another app. Sending SMSes from inside Pleco (or any iPhone app other than SMS) is impossible, but we can certainly streamline the process of getting newly-edited documents into SMS, and we could also hook up a way to directly send email messages at least.

Great to hear you have plans to expand the HWR, that is welcome news. I think I will wait until I can download the bug fixed version and then have at it.
謝謝 M
 

hannes

Member
How about selling the HWR to apple for a few million dollars and make them throw over board their poor version of the same?

I already found myself doing the two finger tap when writing SMS, with not much joy. As some other post said I really do not want to use the apple version anymore after using the pleco one for just a few days.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
maimengzhu - if you just turn off that option it should work fine; we changed the default for it from "off" to "on" late in our testing and it never came up, but editing with that option off was pretty well tested during the beta.

hannes - well bear in mind we licensed the algorithm from another company - our innovation was all on the interface side. But we are the first people to use that two-finger gesture for handwriting as far as I know... I don't think Apple would want to do fullscreen handwriting even if they did acquire Pleco, though - the compatibility issues with iPhone applications designed around the standard-size iPhone keyboard would be enormous.
 
Top