Feature suggestion: Handwriting recognition of sequences of characters on large screens

[Shun]

Hello Mike,

when entering Chinese expressions on large screens, instead of drawing the characters one by one, it would of course surely feel intuitive and speed things up if the handwriting recognizer were able to detect multiple characters written next to each other.

Failing an improved handwriting recognizer, what may also work well would be if the tablet's handwriting area could be split up into, say, four equal, dynamically sized squares for the user to write in. That way, inputting characters should feel like writing on special writing paper.

Clearing characters with a two-finger tap could also work character by character: Either through the improved recognizer or by two-finger-tapping inside one of the squares. Two-finger-tapping outside of the squares could clear the whole expression.

Might such an enhancement perhaps fit in for a post-4.0 version, or is it already planned?

Many thanks,

Shun

 

[mikelove]

To be honest, 'power user' enhancements to our handwriting are something I haven't put much thought into because my impression is that a lot of the things people want - including this - are already covered by Apple/Google's built-in Chinese handwriting recognizers and by third-party keyboards. (heck, on an iPad with a stylus you can even write right in the input box with Scribble)

The main reasons we even still offer our own handwriting input are that a) the built-in Chinese handwriting IME can be hard for users to find, b) some Android devices don't ship with Chinese handwriting at all, and c) iOS defaults to auto-submitting characters on a timer and the option to disable that is even harder to find. All of those are problems for new / tech-averse users, and worth fixing in order to make Pleco more accessible to them, but entering lots of characters faster isn't really something we're optimizing around.

If we wanted to do a good job with multi-character input like you describe, there are certainly other / better algorithms we could license to facilitate that, but I don't know where the money is coming from to pay for that license when the people who'd be most interested in it are also those most likely to download an alternate Chinese IME. Even an alternate interface like you describe would probably have to be off by default, because we have quite a few users for whom having a giant iPad handwriting box is an absolute godsend for accessibility - they can only draw Chinese characters if they have a 6x6 inch space to do it in - and we would not want to take that away unexpectedly.

(I will at least file away 'alternate interface with multiple boxes' as a potential future feature to investigate, but would probably be well post-4.0)

 

[Shun]

Thanks a lot for the long and thoughtful answer! I agree there are many other, more important things to be attacked first, and the constantly improving alternative IMEs are taking away pressure.

In my view, some advantages of Pleco's built-in handwriting recognizer are its possibilities for deeper integration with Pleco, its usually more responsive UI and more efficient code, and the larger screen area available to it, which the IMEs can't copy.

I'm glad I could contribute a new idea with the boxes.