Text Entry Systems

CHAPTER 7

Introduction to Shape Writing

Shumin Zhai,     IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, USA

Per Ola Kristensson,     Linköpings Universitet, Linköping, Sweden

7.1 INTRODUCTION

The previous chapter (Chap. 6) gives an overview of two types of pen-based text input methods. One is based on conventional handwriting scripts (Tappert et al., 1990) and the other is based on artificial or novel character sets such as Graffiti and Unistrokes (Goldberg & Richardson, 1993). Pen-stroke gestures¹ can also be used in many other ways for text entry. For example, traditional shorthand systems use a large set of pen-stroke symbols to represent phonemes or syllables (Kreitzman, 1998).

This chapter introduces “shape writing”—a novel form of writing ...