From: Victor Rehorst (victor_at_newtontalk.net)
Date: Mon Oct 03 2005 - 06:52:12 PDT
Michael Blazer wrote:
> The maker of the (from all accounts, terrific) Mac backup/disk cloner
> utility Super Duper has a post on his site that talks about the Newton
> handwriting recognition as an example of something that can't possibly
> live up to user expectations. OK, fair enough, maybe, and he goes on to
> make some interesting points. But then he says this:
>
> "Newton, near the end of its life, tried to get around this problem by
> taking a bit of a Graffiti approach: it asked people to print, and
> there’s a lot less letter variation in printed characters. Suddenly,
> with that Rosetta recognizer (still in use in Mac OSX today), people
> started saying the Newton did a good job recognizing handwriting when—in
> actuality—it just shifted the burden onto the user some more by
> restricting input."
>
>http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/comments/blame_the_weather/
>
> Doesn't sound right to me. True, printing gives the greatest accuracy,
> but I don't remember the Newton ever *asking* me to print. If I write
> in a reasonably neat cursive, I get good enough accuracy on my MP2100
> that I can use it for note-taking in meetings and seminars instead of
> paper. And it's far better than it was in NOS 1.x.
Actually, when you go through initial setup, it asks you if you want to use
printing or cursive recognition. So it does, at least in order to choose what
HWR engine to use...
But I think saying that printing is more restrictive than cursive is, frankly,
bollocks. It's personal preference. For me, being a somewhat recent graduate
of an independent but public high school, I haven't written cursive since
Grade 7. I can still do it but only very slowly, and not very neatly.
Printing is how I get by, and I've seen a lot of people who write in a
printed/cursive melange anyways.
This might be on one of Walter Smith's papers on the subject, but I believe
that the next goal of the Rosetta engine, once near-perfect printed accuracy
was attained, was to work on recognizing letters joined together.
-- Victor Rehorst - victor_at_newtontalk.net - chuma_at_chuma.org NewtonTalk list administrator - http://www.newtontalk.net Will the last person to leave the platform please turn off the backlight? -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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