Inputing anything on the iPad more complex than – ‘I want that’ – is frustrating, even moreso with the keyboard.
The thought of taking notes on the iPad during meetings is still ridiculous. And I started wondering how people quickly took notes before we all became such proficient touch typists.
The idea of a single gesture representing a word (or series of words) rather than a single character is very appealing. And with a Javascript library like Raphaël, this could even be a web-based app.
Shorthand has least as much of a learning curve as QWERTY.
This is possible. I write in Gregg shorthand, and if you don’t already know, the piece in your picture above is The Lord’s Prayer. (Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed by Thy Name, etc.) The stuff can really be read and written, and it IS a great time saver.
I need a converter program, and if you know anyone who’d like to tackle it, I can get them half way there. I have an extensive homebrewed Gregg equivalent dictionary and need someone with vector graphics mad skills to translate the funky swirls into simple letters. For example, the 6th symbol on your sheet is the first one with a dot on top. It’s “heaven”. Literally, it’s hevn. The dot is an H. The little circle is an E. The long sweeping line is the V. The last short horizontal line is an N.
If you can turn human-written glyphs into letters by that direct correlation, we can deploy an extensible dictionary of 8,000 words.
And if you do it without me, let me know. I’ll buy it.
It’s MUCH easier for a computer to read confidently than longhand.
I’ll look into Raphael.
The Newton had a handwriting to text app called grafity. I used it quite often. I would like an app to turn greg shprthand to text.
I would also buy a program that I could write in shorthand and have it converted into text, I am sure many people with a tablet computer would by it. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.
I’d pay 200usd to support gregg’s shorthand input method