Character recognition problems

MichaelK

秀才
I was wondering if anyone was having Character Recognition problems with the Palm Zire71.

I don't mean the glitches which cause some phantom lines to appear once in a while, making you re-enter your character, but just an absolute lack of desire of your pda to recognize the simplest 2 stroke characters.

I had a clieSJ20 which I loved. The recognition was fantastic. The digitizer broke so I bought a PalmZire71.

Now I'm slowly moving to Radical lookup.

Does anyone have this problem, and if so, any suggestions on coping?

Right now, I have to make ji3 (which is usually two strokes) with four 90 degree angles to get recognition. I don't even try with characters with a lot of strokes.

Any help would be appreciated.
If this topic has already been covered, my sincerest apologies.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hmm... the most likely causes for problems like this are bad stroke order (not likely to be a problem with ji3) and strokes that are accidentally broken apart by the pen lifting slightly while drawing them - is there any chance that you might not be pressing down hard enough on your Zire's screen? Have you tried drawing in a program like Note Pad to see if pen strokes are captured smoothly and there aren't any problems with your Zire's digitizer?

One other thing you could try is updating to the 2.1 beta (if you're not using it already; see my other message) - it fixes a number of bugs people were having with handwriting recognition and if 2.0.4 isn't working correctly for you there's a very good chance 2.1 might.
 

MichaelK

秀才
Mike, it's not stroke order. I'm practicing from a book.
The English recog. is pretty good, (except for this new Graffiti 2! (grumble)). It's just when I draw a curved line.

Your probably right. digitizer.

also, I notice a lot of extra rastors when I hesitate. Is there a way to make the margin of error larger?

But I wonder ... who makes fake digitizers for Palm. (I can't buy a fake replacement for my my clie in China).

I'm gonna try pressing hard. (and hope I don't crack the digitizer).
I'll post my results.

I don't know if this makes any programming sense but "fang" (please dont ask the tone). 4 strokes. I have to make an actual box for the last stroke.

Well I hope it's the palm, cuz I really like the ware.

Oh yeah, I did upgrade to the beta and it made a minute difference for some characters. (I hope it's not the OS or something I can't prove).

Well, Cheers.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
To tell you the truth I don't really know that much about the algorithms that the Motorola software uses, so I couldn't say much about why it's behaving a particular way (and there's no way to decrease the margin of error). Frankly, if it *isn't* a digitizer or hardware problem then there really won't be anything we can do to fix it until we come out with our own handwriting package (since we don't have access to Motorola's source code), so I hope for your sake that it does simply turn out to be hardware-related.
 

MichaelK

秀才
Beta 2 did it

I'm very happy with beta 2.

That solved all of my recognition problems. I had included with my Palm Zire 71 another dictionary (which is very useful because of the inclusion of modern words (e.g. M-commerce). But, it's designed for native speakers. I cannot write Hanzi that fast, and the lack of pinyin makes it only useful one way ... English to Chinese to show the cab drivers/merchants. I am patiently (but actually anxiously awaiting the new 200k word dictionary). But Kudos, best service/customer support I've ever seen in a software company.

Thanks Mike.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Delighted to hear it. We did tweak the stroke capture a little in beta 2 and I guess that must have made the difference... I'll make sure these same changes make it into the recognizer in PlecoDict (which has mostly been rewritten anyway since the interface is completely different now).
 
Top