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New Kind of Paper

mlajtos.mu

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Re: New Kind of Paper

#91

Post by kzrdude »

nemetroid wrote: post #45
kzrdude wrote: post #43

Nobody writes asterisks like that in handwriting - is that to help the ocr? We just use an × for multiplication, really.

Are you sure about "nobody"? As a corollary, I've only ever used × to indicate the cross product of two vectors. For scalar multiplication, ⋅ is the standard symbol in my country (and many others).

I guess I'm being called out for not handwriting a lot myself anymore either. Yes, I'd use the centered dot too. Anyway, the point is that the asterisk is not what we use in handwriting.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#92

Post by rm445 »

gambiting wrote: post #59

Am I the only person here with handwritting so bad that the automated recognition just completely and utterly fails? I got the latest iPad Pro with the Pencil 2 some time ago - and as much as my friends rave about the "very good and totally great" handwriting recognition in text fields, it's just totally bust for me. I can't write a single word and have it recognized correctly on first try. It takes me 10x as long to…

I don't know if there's any way to use Palm Pilot ('Graffiti') style alphabets on modern devices. I guess every year handwriting recognition gets better, fewer and fewer people are outliers, and it doesn't matter, but it has always appealed to me as a way to increase accuracy, finding an accommodation between man and machine.

On a side note, I've made my handwriting more readable on the past year, and it was a fairly small effort. Changing a few letter forms, but mostly just slowing down and being conscious about it. Little things like slanting the crosses on 'f' and 't' so they're distinct rather than running together.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#93

Post by drdeadringer »

bovermyer wrote: post #88

I like my regular old organic paper just fine, thanks. Sure, writing with ancient mechanical tools lacks modern computational technology, but that's kind of the point. Unconnected from the rest of the world, my writing exists only as a conduit from me to the page. If I want to refine that and digitize it, I can then hand-type it into a digital medium, which acts to reinforce in my brain what I wrote and allow me a bo…

> I like my regular old organic paper just fine, thanks.

I'm picturing the scene in 'Saving Private Ryan' where the translator is trying to shoehorn his typewriter into his travel supplies and Tom Hanks slowly raises a pen instead.

I agree with you. I have enough paper and pens to last a good while of first drafts. My typing them into digital medium works for me like it does for you.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#94

Post by mlajtos »

satyrnein wrote: post #13

I find the current state of the art on stylus text entry so disappointing. I made a hacky prototype 7 years ago (!) and this kind of direct interaction remains a dream: https://youtu.be/So4x3Cu4WI0 I had a glimmer of hope when Apple started selling styluses, that they might succeed where Microsoft failed. But instead, they're putting mouse cursors on iPads, and the stylus is still a niche tool for artists.

That is great prototype. iPadOS 14 has the same feature called Scribble. I bet your work found a way to the people that made Scribble.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#95

Post by mcphage »

mlajtos wrote: post #80
mcphage wrote: post #10

The parsed version flashing every time a change was made was distracting… you don’t want to keep having your eyes pulled away from where you are writing. Also, having all of the input terms be integers, yet the answer returned as a floating point, seems a basic type error. In general, though, it seems to miss the mark. If you’re going with a hybrid electronic/pen approach, why not let the computer handle the annoying…

> The parsed version flashing every time a change was made was distracting… you don’t want to keep having your eyes pulled away from where you are writing. Totally. > Also, having all of the input terms be integers, yet the answer returned as a floating point, seems a basic type error. Spot on. > In general, though, it seems to miss the mark. If you’re going with a hybrid electronic/pen approach, why not let the comp…

> I am familiar with Bret Victor's work, but I don't know which interaction you have in mind.

Just the idea that since you’re working on a computer, you should be able to take advantage of it. So once the numbers are in there, you should be able to tweak them around without having to re-write everything. What if this value was higher? What if it was lower? How would that affect the results? Let the calculation be explorable.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#96

Post by galangalalgol »

franga2000 wrote: post #78
zimpenfish wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a developer writes an app that automatically defaults to having configs right in the home dir To be fair, I think `units` and `~/.units` predate XDG paths by a couple of decades at least (`units` was from Bell Labs, XDG paths are from somewhere around 2005-2010 as best I can find.)

Oh yeah, definitely, and so do most other programs that don't respect the standard (VS Code being the biggest exception). Still, wouldn't hurt to update things a little, although in the grander "backwards compatibility vs modernisation" debate, this is still a small and insignificant issue.

I don't think anything I use uses those paths, I'd never even heard of them. Vscode, conan, cmake, gdb, perf, docker, vim, git, any of those use it?

Re: New Kind of Paper

#97

Post by ajuc »

bovermyer wrote: post #88

I like my regular old organic paper just fine, thanks. Sure, writing with ancient mechanical tools lacks modern computational technology, but that's kind of the point. Unconnected from the rest of the world, my writing exists only as a conduit from me to the page. If I want to refine that and digitize it, I can then hand-type it into a digital medium, which acts to reinforce in my brain what I wrote and allow me a bo…

I would love it if I could tap a few terms in an equation and have them refactored out in the next line.

Or if I could select an equation, mark parameters and get an interactive chart.

Or if I could select a graph and have it topologically sorted for me.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#98

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Some of us ...of a certain age... may remember an ATG Night at an Apple WWDC in the 1990s.

This kid comes out on stage, holding a tablet, and starts writing math formulas, which are recognized and displayed on the screen. Then he starts balancing the equation; dragging variables from one side of the equals to the other, and the program automatically does stuff like invert the operations.

Then, he graphs it.

A whole conference hall of geeks gave him a standing ovation.

That became the first Apple Graphing Calculator app.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#99

Post by fsiefken »

I remember the Apple Newton, mine took 4 AA battery's and did very adequate handwriting recognition.

From wikipedia:

The original handwriting recognition engine was called Calligrapher, and was licensed from a Russian company called Paragraph International. Calligrapher's design was quite sophisticated; it attempted to learn the user's natural handwriting, using a database of known words to make guesses as to what the user was writing, and could interpret writing anywhere on the screen, whether hand-printed, in cursive, or a mix of the two. By contrast, Palm Pilot's Graffiti had a less sophisticated design than Calligrapher, but was sometimes found to be more accurate and precise due to its reliance on a fixed, predefined stroke alphabet. The stroke alphabet used letter shapes which resembled standard handwriting, but which were modified to be both simple and very easy to differentiate.[..]

For editing text, Newton had a very intuitive system for handwritten editing, such as scratching out words to be deleted, circling text to be selected, or using written carets to mark inserts.[5]

Later releases of the Newton operating system retained the original recognizer for compatibility, but added a hand-printed-text-only (not cursive) recognizer, called "Rosetta", which was developed by Apple, included in version 2.0 of the Newton operating system, and refined in Newton 2.1. Rosetta is generally considered a significant improvement and many reviewers, testers, and most users consider the Newton 2.1 handwriting recognition software better than any of the alternatives even 10 years after it was introduced.[6] Recognition and computation of handwritten horizontal and vertical formulas such as "1 + 2 =" was also under development but never released

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad#Handwriting_recogni...

Re: New Kind of Paper

#100

Post by jiofih »

There are quite a few apps that can do this. Nobo comes to mind.

They just don’t feel that useful. For complex work, typing on a keyboard and using a cursor at the same time is much more productive.

(this comment typed one-handed using the iPhone’s swipe keyboard)

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