Human and Machine Readable Handwritten Language?

darrint writes "In some obscure corner of the Earth, has someone developed a human handwritten language which can be easily read by a machine? Why is the visual divide between what can be written by a human and what can be read by a machine so wide? At one extreme is the bar code, which I certainly cannot hand write. Machines can read it easily. Bank checks have a human readable account and routing numbers printed in special ink running along their bottom margins. These numbers can be read by a machine and are clearly legible to a human, but I doubt I could write them for input to a machine. My old Palm handheld could read something like handwriting in its little box. OCR exists but I've never thought of it as reliable. I would like to dash off little notes on stickies or in a tiny spiral notebook and be able to suck them into vim, a browser text-input box, and so forth. Perhaps I'd have to learn some kind of machine readable 'shorthand.' Has it been done?"

Comments

1994 called

[OwlofCreamCheese]

try every PDA on the market in the last 10 years or OCR software newer than 1990.

I believe it has been done

[the_other_one]

I'm old enough to have filled in punch cards with a pencil. Does that count?

Um...

[Who235]

Can't you type faster than you can write? What are you, an executive or something?

Re:There's a solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean Dvorak?

OCR

[Anonymous Coward]

what"S wranq vith FngIish? 1 vse a handwntting recOqntion Pragrarn alI the tlme ond it vvork5 great,

Re:Ideal handwriting style

[ipoverscsi]

I take umbrage to your comment, sir.

As a programmer, it is my job to every day reinvent the wheel!

Yes, it has been done.

[nilbog]

Machines can tell the difference between 1's and 0's with virtually perfect accuracy. 01001101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101 01110011 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100110 01100110 01100101 01110010 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01110100 01110111 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 00110001 00100111 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 00110000 00100111 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 00100000 01110110 01101001 01110010 01110100 01110101 01100001 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01110000 01100101 01110010 01100110 01100101 01100011 01110100 00100000 01100001 01100011 01100011 01110101 01110010 01100001 01100011 01111001 00101110