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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?"
They don't read from paper. They can get extra info:
* pressure
* speed
* stroke order
* stroke direction
* pen-up and pen-down events
* timing
Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.
Okay. I'm attacking the point of the post.
There's no reason to reinvent the alphabet any more than there is reinvent the wheel.
If we change the alphabet so machines can read it, other people stop being able to read it. It's the wrong solution for the problem.
If my handwriting is good enough that I can read it two weeks later, and my peers and friends and family can read it perfectly (i've been told I have particularly good handwriting) then why should I have to change it so that my PC can understand it, but nobody else can?
I could memorize a second alphabet, having one for me and one for my PC... but why?
If I could tell the software "This is how I write a 'k' and this is how I write an 'R'", that would improve things a lot IMO. My 'k' might look like someone else's 'R'; but my 'k' and 'R' look absolutely nothing alike. My ampersand kind of looks like a plus sign; but it's totally distinguishable from my plus sign. If I could dawn this on the software...