Newton OS - Handwriting Recognition

Handwriting Recognition

The Newton used the CalliGrapher word-based handwriting recognition engine developed by ParaGraph International Inc, led by former Soviet scientist Stepan Pachikov

The earliest versions had weaknesses that resulted in bad publicity and reviews. However, with the release of Newton PDAs based upon version 2.0 of the OS, the handwriting recognition had substantially improved, partially being a product of ParaGraph and an Apple-created recognizer pair: Apple's Rosetta and Mondello. Newton's handwriting recognition, particularly the print recognizer, has been considered by many reviewers, testers, and users to be the best in the industry, even 10 years after it was introduced. It was developed by Apple's Advanced Technology Group, and has been described as "the world's first genuinely usable handwriting recognition system".

The Newton could recognize hand-printed text, cursive, or a mix of the two, and could also accept free-hand "Sketches", "Shapes", and "ink text". Text could also be entered by tapping with the stylus on a small on-screen pop-up QWERTY keyboard. With "Shapes", Newton could recognize that the user was attempting to draw a circle, a line, a polygon, etc., and it would clean them up into "perfect" vector representations (with modifiable control points and defined vertices) of what the user was attempting to draw. "Shapes" and "Sketches" could be scaled or deformed once drawn. "Ink text" captured the user's free-hand writing but allowed it to be treated somewhat like recognized text when manipulating for later editing purposes ("ink text" supported word wrap, could be formatted to be bold, italic, etc.). At any time a user could also direct the Newton to recognize selected "ink text" and turn it into recognized text (deferred recognition). A Newton Note document (or the notes attached to each contact in Names and each calendar event) could contain any mix of interleaved text, ink text, Shapes, and Sketches.

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Famous quotes containing the words handwriting and/or recognition:

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