rosetta - multistroke / full word handwriting recognition for X

Copyright (C) 2003 Ole Reinhardt <[email protected]>


Rosetta is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

Comments are welcome.

What is rosetta?
----------------

Rosetta is a new handwriting recognition engine for the X Window System. It
supports multi stroke recognition and recognition for whole words /
sentences. It captures characters written in a small window with a pointing
device (mouse, tablet or pen), recognizes them and passes the relating
keypress events to the actualy focused window.
You can write multi characters at once, but they may not be connected (like
script). Single characters are recognized depending on the field you write
in (lowercase, uppercase or special characters), multiple characters are
recognizes as lower case characters .

Rosetta has been developed on Linux systems, (i386 and StrongARM), but
should be quite portable to any reasonable system with X. Rosetta still is
experimental.

Many of the ideas that have gone into the development of Rosetta are derived
from xmerlin, written by Stefan Hellkvist. To His Ideas I added the multi
stroke support and some more classification functions, resulting in Rosetta. 

What does rosetta depend on?
----------------------------
To compile rosetta you will need:
	X
	A C compiler

To compile the rosetta learning application you'll also need GTK 2.x and the
GPE build framework (e.g. libgpewidget)

Compiling rosetta
-----------------
If you would like to compile rosetta, simply edit the Makefile to
point to correct locations for X and GPE and the type make. (Yes, this is
a primitive build environment -- something fancy like autoconf perhaps will 
come in a future release).

To install, simply type 

make install

Using rosetta
-------------

The rosetta package consists of two applications. rosetta itself and the
rosetta leaning application.

Running rosetta the first time will result in a long startup time. There
will be done some precalculations which will be saved in

/usr/local/share/rosetta/rosetta.pc

Rosetta will be installed together with a standard config file for german
and english characters. The config file is located in 

/etc/rosetta.conf

Rosetta neets a database of known strokes. The one shipped with rosetta
contains my handwriting. You could create your own by starting the learning
application, klick on the "learn" button and then write character by
character all characters shown in the "Name" field. Every character can
contain of one or more strokes. After closing the
learning application your own database is saved.

The global database is located at:

/usr/local/share/rosetta/rosetta.db

The user database is located at:

~/.rosetta/rosetta.db

After starting rosetta itself you'll get a small input window. With
mbdesktop it will be integrated as new input method. The input window is
seperated into three fields.

Field "abc" is dedicated to lower case characters / numbers and some
interpunctation characters.

Field "ABC" is dedicated to upper case characters and also numbers and some
interpunctation characters.

Field "Symbol" is dedicated to all other characters and special function
keys (eg. cursor keys, function keys etc.)

If you write only one character the field you write in will be respected. If
you write more than one character all characters will be assumed to be lower
characters / numbers or some of the interpunctation characters (same as if
you wrote in "abc" field). All characters have to be seperated from each
other, so you may not write script but "printed characters".

If you write more than one word rosetta will try to find out the word
seperation.

The german "umlaute" (e.g. äöü) wont have their own representation in the
database. They will be matched by the number of "dots" you wrote on top of
the character. This is configurable in the config file.

In the learning application you can overwrite each character by hand or
learn the whole configured alphabet. To overwrite a single character simply
navigate to the character and then write the new one. To train the whole
alphabet navigate to the first alphabet and press the learn button. Now
write every character as shown in the "name" label. As configured in the
config file every character is repeatet several times in the database to get
better results in the recognition.

Automatic learning is stopped by navigation in the database or by changing
to the testmode.

In testmode (Test tab) you can write characters and words an will see the
result in the input box.

Well, that's about it. Feel free to send me comments, suggestions, or
bug fixes.

-Ole Reinhardt <[email protected]>