Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I am releasing a new project to provide handwriting recognition service on Linux/Unix computers, found here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ink2text/.

This provides a shared library which can receive a stream of points representing handwriting on a tablet and returns what is written as text.

The idea is that any program can be enabled for hand-written input.

Unlike my first solution, this system does not require any copies of Windows - it only requires WINE (tested with v1.2 on Lucid 10.04 LTS) and some packages installed, and is much easier to set up. The details are in the included file named INSTALL.

At this time, you will also need to install my Stylus/Handwriting Input Panel project, which I have upgraded to use the new recognition system:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ship-project/

Together this provides printed and cursive handwriting input for tablet computers.

Please try it and help me iron out any bugs in the install process. Then start bugging the Gnome & KDE people to tablet-enable their UI components.

PLEASE use the sourceforge project forums for support questions so others may benefit from the information.

Cheers,
bcw

Hi Brett,

I'm running CentOS 6.4 on an X41 Tablet (and it runs well).

I'm interested in your ink2text project and wonder if it requires Wine because using the .NET Framework and if we could not get rid of it and make ink2text native for Linux ?

For this, I'm thinking to XBasic. This language belongs to the family of BASIC dialects, but is much more powerful than many ones.
It allows to compile programs for Windows as well as for Linux, and also it is (very) fast and does not resquire Java.

To write programs, the most efficient is to use xblite, which uses the very nice XSED editor. Programs can be debugged and compiled from within XSED.
Also, xblite provides a very nice CHM help file.
http://xblite.com/

Xblite is a younger brother of XBasic and only runs on Windows.

But as xblite syntax is at 99% a subset of XBasic, programs written in the xblite editor can later be compiled for Linux using the (older) Xbasic development environment.
See http://www.maxreason.com/software/xbasic/xbasic.html
as well as http://www.xbasic.org

Concerning graphical applications, the programs can use the GTK+ library instead of using XBasic's native graphical functions.
(I can provide some examples if you're interested.)