

Windows 7 Ink Input and Math Handwriting Recognition - Radix
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/23/ink-input-and-tablet.aspx

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KrisJordan
When I was a graduate student at Brown I was advised by Andy van Dam and was a
member of the 'Microsoft Center for Research on Pen-Centric Computing'
(<http://pen.cs.brown.edu/>)

The research group had developed an in-house math recognition engine that was
very impressive but required some training and relied on some heuristics that
worked for the group but likely wouldn't work for a general population. The
math recognition engine was built out of necessity because Microsoft's
previous math reco was terrible.

Gates, being a huge proponent of natural human interfaces and the pen in
general, and the folks at Microsoft have put major efforts toward what's going
into 7. They actually had two different teams working on math reco, one in
China and one in a European center. The China team came out to visit us once
and their engine was driven by a _massive_ corpus of user-written input. From
the sound of things their engine was further along so I wouldn't be surprised
if this is what is in 7.

Microsoft has poured _significant_ resources into handwriting recognition
development, internal research, and external research. 7's support is going to
be the best we've ever seen.

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mattmaroon
I still look at good handwriting recognition much like cold fusion. I'll
believe it when I'm on the intergalactic starship.

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jcl
_Have you heard of the formula recognized in the example above? You haven’t J,
well, it’s the Schwarz formula used in complex analysis!_

I wonder if the "J," in this article caption is a typo (or "handwriting-o"?)
for a question mark, caused by using the handwriting recognition system to
write the article?

~~~
dcminter
More probably a font-transliteration issue. J in Wingdings is a smiley. I
often see it in Outlook emails received in Thunderbird where the sender typed
a smiley, outlook converted it to a Wingdings smiley, then it got converted
into plain ASCII.

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trezor
Not being a big fan of tablet PCs and pen input, if the math input works as
good as it seems, I can definitely see how that would have made entering
formulas in my masters thesis a million times quicker.

For most (in the western part of the world) these are probably rather niche
features, but it still looks like solid work: It reads kanjis better than I do
:)

