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Sunday, September 02, 2001 -
12:00 a.m. Pacific Reviews By Craig Crossman Today's popular PDAs like the Palm use a shorthand form of handwriting called Graffiti. It takes a while to learn because some letters and punctuation must be formed differently. The Palm also requires you to enter each letter in the same surface area rather than alongside of each other. So instead of the natural movement from left to right as you write, your hand remains stationary as you overwrite each character. And of course, you must carry the PDA wherever you plan to use it. But now there's another way. SoftWriting is a remarkable new program that reads handwriting in much the same fashion as optical-character-recognition (OCR) software scans typewritten text. With SoftWriting, you simply place your handwritten document into a scanner and watch your words appear typed into your word processor. You can even stylize your writing. For example, words you underline will appear as underlined typewritten text. Or you can instruct SoftWriting to apply most any style such as boldface or outline to anything you underline. If you've drawn something such as arrows, a picture or anything else on your document that you don't want to be transcribed, you can tell SoftWriting to keep it as a graphical image and move it into the final electronic document just as it appears on the scanned paper. SoftWriting requires no training out of the box. As you continue to use the program, it continues to learn your handwriting and accuracy improves. All of this occurs in the background without requiring your attention. Claimed accuracy is around 98 percent. One thing you will have to learn is that each character you write must be disconnected from the others. You don't have to print although printing will work as well. Downloadable from the Charactell Web site, softwriting.com, SoftWriting is fully functional for 14 days so you can try before you buy. If you like it, $59.95 buys the unlocking code. It requires Windows. |
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