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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?"
Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.
OCR/handwriting recognition folks: what would the ideal handwriting for machine readability look like? Could simple variations on standard English cursive or printing approach 100% recognizability, or would the ideal have to be synthesized, like shorthand, and if so, what characteristics would such a script have?