Character recognizer

[umichboy]

I'm still rather new to PPC (About 1.5 months of play time so far). I was wondering if there was a place with the way to write for the character recognizer somewhere? Most specifically I don't know how to write an i ...

Because of this, I tend to stick with block recognizer. But then block recognizer is not so good with d... I end up with some other character that's used for pronunciations unless I really draw the d well.

And transcriber is no better than my Newtons ;-) But I never let anyone write on those.

[Janak Parekh]

I assume you're referring to Letter Recognizer... in any case, hit the little Question mark in the bottom-right of the Letter Recognizer SIP, and from there you can request an interactive demo of any character.

--janak

[Dave Beauvais]

A lower-case "I" is made by either making a straight vertical line from the bottom up or from the top down with a dot on top. The dot changes it from an "L" to an "I" automatically. Another tricky letter for me to write is a "T". I end up using an upside-down "L," which seems to work. Being left-handed, I write some letters differently than most people, I guess.

Which brings me to Transcriber... You really must "tweak" it before it will work its best. The config dialog (accessed by pressing the button on the Transcriber toolbar that looks like a handwritten "a") presents you with every letter, number, and some symbols along with an assortment of possible ways to write that character. You tell Transcriber which way you write the letter most frequently. After taking the five to ten minutes required to configure it, I think you'll find that Transcriber works much better and far more accurately than it does in its default mode. Also in Transcriber's settings, be sure to set the Recognizer Speed vs. Quality all the way to "Quality." You can even save you config to a file which can be loaded later. I save my config so it can be reloaded after I hard reset -- no retraining necessary!

--Dave

[umichboy]

Transcriber works great. I'm just saying that my Newton works well too. =)

[dh]

I still prefer Grafiti on the Palm, but with the new models about to start using Jot, PPC might well have the edge in data input from the screen.

[taxus]

Which brings me to Transcriber... You really must "tweak" it before it will work its best.

Hey thanks! So far I didn't have the patience to go through all that, but spent 20 minutes last night configuring Transcriber. The result is amazing. I spent an hour writing (bad) French translations for Spb Pocket Plus on my Pocket PC using Transcriber. I'd never even have considered doing it with Letter Recognizer, but with Transcriber I got 98% accuracy. (The 2% loss being mostly my own fault: I'm not used to hand writing anymore and my hand gets quickly tired.)

And in 5 years on Palms I never reached such writing speed with Grafiti.

You just made a convert. :D