Glossary

Anoto Functionality

A standard developed by Anoto that enables a digital pen to store information written on digital paper with a special pattern. It makes pen and paper digital, providing an interesting platform for creating user friendly solutions for a vast variety of applications in a multitude of markets.

Boxed field

A writing area on a form where a box represents the space intended for one character.

Cursive handwriting

Handwriting style, also called "joined-up" or "running writing" or "natural writing", in which letters may or may not be joined as you write.

Data Format

A Data Format defines the linguistic, syntactic, and semantic constraints of the handwritten information to be recognized by the recognition engine; it could be described as the expected type of input. Your handwriting context's Data Format may be textual, and could be recognized with the help of a lexicon, or it could be more specific, such as a date or time, in which case it could be defined in the form of a regular expression. MyScript Builder offers language-specific Data Formats to assist in the recognition.

Digital ink

A series of strokes following the trajectory of the user's handwriting, entered using a pen or pointing device through pen interfaces such as a PDA touch screen, TabletPC touch screen, Smartphone touch screen, Digital Pen, Graphics Tablet, Interactive Whiteboard, and so on.

Form

A structured document in which handwriting is constrained into specific areas, defined by combs or boxes or guide lines or similar, with specific content types (fields).

Hand printed writing

Handwriting style in which characters are not necessarily separated physically (e.g in boxes) but with which each character must be fully formed (including any diacritical marks such as accents) before starting the next. A distinct pen lift must occur between the two characters.

ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition)

A method for recognizing hand written text. Data input can be offline (image from a scanner) but is most commonly online from a pen or pointing device. The text is analyzed to identify characters or digits and this analysis is then translated into a character code system such as ASCII. ICR is often used as a synonym for handwriting recognition.

Isolated Characters

Handwriting style in which characters are separated individually, in boxes for example.

Lexicon

A lexicon is a vocabulary list: it does contain words, typically, but it may also contain groups of words such as proper names, brand names, trademarks and other lexical expressions (which may include separators) that only make sense when they are kept together.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

A method for recognizing printed or written text by a computer. The text is scanned, this scanned image is analyzed to identify characters or digits and this analysis is then translated into a character code system such as ASCII. OCR recognition methods use offline data, based on scanned images.

Offline Data

This refers to the type of data used in OCR text recognition technology. When you scan text for OCR, the text is already written or printed; the way that text is entered (such as the pen strokes making up each letter) is not taken into account.

Online Data

The data input used for HWR technology. Unlike in OCR technology, the way text is entered (e.g. with a digital pen) is all-important. The strokes and trajectories made are the data used by the recognition engine, rather than a bitmap image.

Pen or Pointing Device

A digital pen or pointing device is an input peripheral that is able to capture digital ink, be that the user's handwriting, drawings, scribbles or other handwritten material.

Regular Expression

An expression defined using operators that specifies what characters to expect in an input unit and in which order. These are used to define certain lexical units that you wish to recognize, such as dates, prices, etc.

Resource

Resource files are files used by the recognition engine to assist it in the recognition process, for example, the files that identify handwriting styles are resources, as are files used to recognize data formats, based on lexicons, or regular expressions. This knowledge is compiled into a file format, ready to be attached to a recognizer.

Segmentation

A process by which the recognition engine breaks digital ink into input ranges. This occurs at a text, word and character level.

Stroke

The trajectory the pen describes between touching the handwriting surface and being lifted again. A stroke is a sequence of acquired 2D points over time.

Symbian

Symbian is the standard operating system targeted at mobile phones (smartphones), offering high integration levels for communication and information management features.

Windows CE

Based on the Microsoft Windows operating system, this is a 32-bit multitasking, multithreading operating system especially designed for including or embedding in mobile and other limited-space devices. Windows CE is used particularly in some handheld computers and for cable TV boxes.

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