Re: [NTLK] Inkwell and cursive HWR in OS X

At 7:30 AM +0200 5/8/08, Jon Glass wrote:
>From my own experience, it _does_ learn, not just you. Here's how you
>can "tell." In the System HWR prefs (if you have alt.rec installed,
>you need to choose that from alt.rec's prefs in the Notepad), make
>sure you have "cursive" turned on, and choose "Letter Shapes" from the
>popup down below. This window shows the various ways that people
>write their letters. As you go through your letters, you will see
>particular shapes outlined with a box. Those are what the HWR engine
>has identified as _your_ style. Now, the cool part is that if you are
>having problems with particular letters, you can manually chose a
>style, yourself.

Are you sure those aren't the default letter shapes that are initially highlighted?

>And in a side note, my own personal experience indicates that manually
>choosing styles also works for printed recognition. I had a couple
>letters (capital i, for one) that I fixed this way. For me, the best
>way was to turn _off_ the styles I never use, by choosing "never" down
>below. I cannot prove it works, but the HWR has always worked better
>after I've done this, even with printed recognition. BTW, remember to
>turn "printed" back on after you muck with the letter shapes window.

Oh dear, I really hate to interfere with the nice, improved behavior you thought you experienced, but, honest, the print recognizer doesn't even know you've changed anything over in that part of the world. It doesn't access any of that information, and it doesn't use explicit letter styles in the first place. Instead the neural network character classifier works out what features to look for in order to recognize letters based on all the sample data it is trained with. Paragraph, by contrast, does have an idea of specific letter styles or templates. (I think. As Paragraph had proprietary rights to the cursive engine, we were never allowed to so much as glance at their code. But I've heard them give presentations on their technology and think I have at least a vague idea of how it works.)

- larryy

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Received on Thu May 8 03:41:27 2008