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From: trh@atari.UUCP (T R Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.atari.st.tech
Subject: Re: ST Pad specs
Message-ID: <2881@atari.UUCP>
Date: 25 Mar 91 18:38:20 GMT
References: <27E4E601.1238@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> <1991Mar21.080126.22262@ecst.csuchico.edu>
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 34

ekrimen@ecst.csuchico.edu (Ed Krimen) writes:

>johns@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Conan the Barbarian) writes:

>- TOS with additional stylus features including mouse emulation and
>- handwriting recognition.
> 
>I don't know, but for some reason 'TOS with...handwriting recognition'
>doesn't seem to jive, if you know what I mean. :^)

>Thanks for posting the information.  May I ask where you found it?  I 
>just like to know the sources of these things. :^)

     You may feel skeptical, but as the designer of the two machines
announced, I can tell you that "TOS ... with handwritting recognition" is
FACT, not conjecture. The HCR code will be in the ROMs (and was, in the Demo
at CeBIT), and tied into the operating system and desktop such that a gesture
in the Menu Bar area will bring up a window (as invisibly to existing
applications as possible) into which Hand-written characters are drawn. As you
write, the characters are converted to ASCII; when you are satisfied, the
characters are sent (via the Keyboard input stream) to the application. This
way, _*existing*_ applications will have HCR capabilitites.

     The "hooks" to call the HCR system will be available to software
developers, so they may call it directly, to recognize ASCII characters,
special character sets, or even gestures. This will be part of the standard
documentation. In case you're curious, the software is a neural-net
simulation.

						TRH

[ Incidently, "OCR" is "Optical Character Recognition" and "HCR" is
"Handwritten Character Recognition"; the former uses the Bit-Map image; the
latter uses the "pen-stroke" information directly.]