Suggestion re: handwriting recognition

carlsonme

Member
Hi Mike,

This is a fairly minor suggestion about the handwriting input feature on 2.0. If I draw a character, particularly a complicated one, then select a character from the various options offered that turns out not to be the right one, I am forced to draw the damn thing all over again, sometimes with different results. It is possible to make it so that the last set of character suggestions remains on screen when the user goes in and out of handwriting input mode?

I suppose the same question could be formulated for radical input as well. Is this feasible?

Best from Paris,

Mark Carlson
 

Rafael

秀才
I completely agree! This is a very good idea. It is a pain to have to redraw the character if the wrong one is selected by mistake.

It is especially nice on radical inputs in order to quickly lookup definitions on different characters with the same radical. This allows the user to make associations of general meanings of the radicals (when they exist).


Rafael
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Great idea! The handwriting part of this is a bit tricky due to the way that our software interfaces with the handwriting recognizer (which we licensed from another company and didn't write ourselves), and that's why we haven't gotten around to doing it yet, but now that you've reminded me I'll make sure we take another look at it for this next upgrade - I can't think of any reason why it would be impossible, just labor-intensive, so hopefully we'll be able to find the time for it.

And no one's ever mentioned doing this with the radical table before, but that would actually be very easy, so we can definitely do it - the radical table's getting a major revamp for the ABC (in part because the current one is based on the Oxford and only includes characters that it covers) so we'll slip this in among the other enhancements.

Many thanks for these suggestions,

Michael Love
Pleco Software
 

herve

举人
some more suggestions...

Hi all,

I also fully agree on that proposal, because I sometimes faced this situation as well...
In order to improve a little more the proposal : an option might be defined so that each user indicates whether he wants the handwriting recognition system to work as it does now, or if he prefers the proposed characters list to appear again when coming back.

Now some different issue :
Sometimes, I am using books with very small characters, which makes reading very difficult (at least for my eyes...). What I would like in the system is that I can "forget" a part of the character. For instance, I draw all lines, except the top-right part of the character for which I specify that I have no idea of how to write it ("specify" by some means to be define: for instance a circle around the relevant zone).
Mike, sorry for that: I imagine that this might not be very simple to implement...

Herve
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well there's no possible way to do this until we write our own Chinese handwriting recognizer. We had thought we might have to make that a high-priority job since there was a chance that Palm OS 6 might break our current software and we have no way to fix it or obtain a new version; hoewver, now that we've had the chance to test the dictionary on OS6 (works great, or as well as on OS5 anyway) there's no big rush to re-do our handwriting recognizer. We'd still like to at some point, though, and if we do this is certainly the sort of feature we'd like to add (and something that several other recognizers are already moving towards).
 
Handwriting recognition

I would love to see something like PenPower that is not from that company. I was so dialed in with the Pleco dictionary and this handwriting recognition program. I would just write my character on the screen while in the dictionary and...boom... just like I had gone into the handwriting screen, it appears in the cusor line. This made quick character checks unbelievably fast. Not only that but I could write memos, SMS, actually anything in CHinese right on the screen.
On the down side, as I mentioned in another topic, is that the company is the worst I have ever done business with. They charge you the unreasonable 50 bucks and then will not give you new registration codes when you upgrade to a new PDA. I'm now without these great features I paid through the nose to get since I upgraded my device... unless I pay another 50 bucks of course. I don't think so.
Mike I would love to see your already exellent dictionary bundled with some sort of handwriting recognition usable in other Palm apps. Or perhaps a customizable user interface inside the dictionary where the handwriting box could be permantly on the dictionary page or near the cursor line somewhere. That way one could cut out the steps needed to access the handwriting screen. That would be cool.
 

linjj

Member
Handwriting recognition area on virtual graffiti area

Mike,
I love your app- for the most part it works beautifully, and I can't wait to upgrade to the bigger dictionary. If I could put my 2 cents in:
  • In terms of devoting your development time to new features.... I would be much more interested in having a handwriting recognition virtual graffiti area (a la Sony Clies' Silk plug-ins) than a "skinnable" customizable interface. IMHO, it's the most important reason I would upgrade besides the improved dictionary. Please, please puh-leeeez make it work! =)

  • If and when you do implement a virtual graffiti handwriting recognition area, will you be using the Palm API or the Sony one? I need to know if I should upgrade =)
  • speaking of handwriting recognition: I applaud your desire to implement a "beginner-friendly" custom handwriting rec. engine to eventually replace Motorola's. I'm concerned as to what "beginner-friendly" will mean to the intermediate or advanced dictionary users who do know the proper stroke sequence, or can write in the cursive "cao xie". Out of all the handwriting-capable dictionaries I've ever used (including those single-purpose paperback-sized monsters), yours has proven to be the most bulletproof, and I hope that at the very least you will continue to leave the current engine as an option. I've had native writers scribble their worst cao xie (jian ti and fan ti) and then express awe that it still shows their intended word as the 1st or 2nd choice.
To summarize: Awesome product, awesome input methods (esp. handwriting). The more accessible and seamless you can make the input methods, and the more words you can put behind it, the better. Keep up the great work!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks for your thoughts on this. We actually are leaning towards a virtual Graffiti area type thing rather than a full-fledged skinnable interface; there's kind of a multi-function floating palette that can be enabled or disabled, resized, and put in various places on the screen and this can optionally be used as a handwriting input box. That's the current design at least.

We'll likely be using only the Palm API, so old pre-OS5 Sony devices may no longer work (ironically enough they're the only ones that support extended displays now)... this is not set in stone though.

As for handwriting recognition, basically the problem with the Motorola one we use now (however good it might be at recognizing cursive) is that it's closed-source and not being supported or updated anymore; hence, while for the time being it continues to work on the current version of Palm OS (and appears to work OK in emulation on the upcoming Palm OS 6/Cobalt too), there's always a chance that a future OS upgrade might break it, and regardless there's no way we can make it work on other platforms like Pocket PC and Symbian. We haven't been able to license another handwriting recognizer under terms we like, and even if we could we haven't been able to even find one on Palm that supports Unicode (which we need in order to recognize all of the characters in the ABC dictionary), so we pretty much have no choice but to develop our own. And honestly cursive handwriting recognition is very very tricky and we don't know how to do it (not well anyway), so at least initially our homebuilt handwriting recognizer will be optimized around writing with separate strokes. We do plan to make stroke order sensitivity an optional feature, so people who can use stroke order correctly will likely gain some accuracy if they turn the feature on, and down the line after we get through a few dozen dense ACM/IEEE research papers on the subject of Chinese cursive handwriting recognition we will hopefully be able to come up with a system that works well with cursive too, but for the time being our new system is going to be at least a little more beginner-oriented than the old one. Some of the improvements we're looking at should benefit everyone, though, so if you can resist the urge to write in cursive even an experienced user like yourself might still be happier with the new system.

On Palm OS we plan to continue including both systems with our software at least until late summer of 2005 (for various legal reasons that's a good cut-off point if we decide to drop the old one), and as I said our testing suggests that the old system still works quite well on the upcoming new version of Palm OS, so you should have both options available for quite a while. And the first version of our new system won't even appear until late fall at the earliest. On Pocket PC/Symbian/etc we will probably only include our new system, which is why it's taking so long for us to put a Pocket PC release together; we have to develop the new system and then we have to get it reasonably well optimized before we can release a product that depends on it so heavily.
 
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