Boogie Board Sync 9.7 eWriter

Posted by Hugh
Jun 22, 2014 at 11:03 AM

Thanks Dr. Andus.

I’m sure that many users of Evernote wish that it did provide what many would regard as true hand-writing recognition. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. It provides hand-writing ‘search-ability’, a kind of ‘internal’ handwriting recognition, if you like. But as for the conversion of hand-writing to printed text, ‘external’ handwriting recognition - no. Few pieces of software seem to do this. One has to assume that all hand-writing recognition is a difficult thing for a machine to do, but that ‘internal’ recognition is useable with more errors than ‘external’. There are of course OCR applications, if your handwriting is clear enough, and there are the ‘ink’ applications that Windows and Apple attach to their platforms. But MyScript comprises one of the very few free-standing groups of applications that provide dedicated, trainable ‘external’ (i.e. conversion) functionality, perhaps the only one.

I read the other day that the hand-writing files that MyScript accepts are not simply graphics - they have a time element in them (is that what is meant by a ‘vector PDF’?). If that is true, it helps explain why simply OCR-ing hand-writing (mine,at least) is often ineffective. It’s trivially interesting that hand-writing recognition appears to have fallen slightly behind speech recognition in its development for consumer use, at least when judged by its error-rate. Perhaps the demand for the technology is lower, or it’s simply technically harder. Perhaps the recent academic interest in the relationship between hand-writing and brain activity will spur development, but I doubt it.