I use a Tablet PC, and have since they first became available. Frankly, I love the device and can’t imagine going back too a mere laptop. A lot of this has to do with growing up in the pre-computer era and learning to think with a pencil in my hand. The ability to write or doodle or even illustrate right on the tablet is just incredibly compelling to me. It is especially cool to be able to write in my own handwriting and see the recognizer render it as text. Since only a few applications support ink natively, up to now I’ve had to write in the little input panel or deal with the disappointing “write anywhere” functionality built in to the Tablet OS.

The ritePen software is a very nice solution to that problem. It allows you to write anywhere on the screen and it recognizes the text and plugs it into any application. Unlike the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) which takes up screen real estate and has small text entry areas, ritePen allows you to write anywhere on the screen in whatever size is comfortable for you. It isn’t even restricted to writing neatly along a guide line, as the built-in write anywhere function is. I’ve found that ritePen is incredibly tolerant of my tendency to write at a slight slant.

Even better, ritePen does a very good job of telling when your pen is hovering over a control, such as an icon in word or a scroll bar and treating that input like normal mouse input. For things like moving the cursor inside of a Word doc or clicking a link in a doc, simply holding the pen tip in one place for a short time tells ritePen you want to be in mouse mode. This method of using pen input becomes second nature very quickly and is very efficient.

The ritePen software offers its own set of “gestures,” the Tablet PC jargon for pen maneuvers that allow you to quickly perform non-text operations without a keyboard. While the ones they have are excellent, they won’t free the Tablet user from having to go to the TIP virtual keyboard for CTRL, ALT, or other keys that you use in Windows. The most noticeable lack is any gesture for TAB, which seems to be a fairly basic and fundamental thing for text editing. I also wish it supported the “scratchout” gesture that not only the TIP but most ink-capable software supports. If you are a Tablet user, you probably already know how useful that gesture is. I’d really like to see future versions support a wider range of gestures.

	Line break (down then left) Inserts line break at the current position of the text cursor in the active application.
	Space (down then right) Inserts space at the current position of the text cursor in the active application. Please make sure that the horizontal portion of the stroke is much longer than the vertical portion.
	Backspace (right to left) Deletes the symbol, immediately preceding the current position of the text cursor in the active application.  Please make sure that the stroke is long enough and not overly curved or slanted.

Of course, using a handwriting recognizer to plug your words into other applications the crucial question is how well does it recognize words? The people who make ritePen claim that its recognition system adds on to and improves the native system in the Tablet OS, and my experience shows that this isn’t just a hollow claim. Everyone I know who uses the Tablet PC has a few writing habits which tend to cause the recognizer to hiccup, and I’m no exception. However, I’ve found that ritePen is much more tolerant of several of my writing habits than the Tablet OS’s native system. I’m getting noticeably better recognition. Actual mileage varies, depending on your handwriting style, but I get excellent recognition. I’ve encouraged my friends to try out the 30-day trial available from their site, and most of them have seen a noticeable improvement in recognition over the Tablet OS recognizer. Although both the native recognizer and ritePen do a more reliable job of recognizing cursive than printing, ritePen seems to be more reliable of printing or a mixture of printing and cursive writing. In general my normal scrawl is recognized well over 90% of the time, and I can get very nearly 100% recognition if I write slowly and close all of my loops and form my letters well. This is pretty impressive, since even when I write slowly and carefully my penmanship is questionable.

For those times when ritePen misreads your input incorrectly, you can call up a list of it’s recommendations for corrections. This is one of the few portions of ritePen where I believe it is actually inferior to the native Tablet OS system.

In theory, ritePen’s correction scheme is better. Instead of hovering over the word to get a smart-tag like icon which allows you to see the correction for a single word, their “Answer List” is invoked by a gesture and gives you a list of all of all of the words recognized in the last pass, each of which has it’s own sub-menu of suggested alternatives. Unfortunately, it has a serious problem which limits its utility.

As I mentioned above, the Answer List only lists the words in the most recent pass of the recognizer. You write a while, pause, and it recognizes that bunch of text. An Answer List is available for all of those words. Once you write another line and it recognizes it, the previous Answer List is gone. This poses two significant problems to using the Answer List. First, one of the best features of ritePen is that it allows you to simply use the pen to write at whatever pace you want, free of the constraints of the TIP panel, for long paragraphs or short sentences, in a much more natural way. However, the “last entry only” nature of the Answer List forces you to compromise that natural flow by stopping to check and edit every time the recognizer accepts your text. If you go back and re-read your document and notice that it substituted “hove” for “have” in an early paragraph the Answer List is of no use to you.

Worse, the smallest extraneous touch of the pen tip to the tablet fires off the recognizer and clears the list. Many times I have just finished a long sentence and use the Answer List gesture only to find it empty because I’d inadvertently rested the pen tip on the tablet.

If you’re very cautious about stopping to edit your text after each recognizer pass the Answer List is actually very good at offering a useful list of alternatives and is very easy to use. However I found that more often than not it was more of a disruption to my work flow.

Currently you can’t add new words to the Answer List, which means that if you use some non-standard jargon it will almost always mis-recognize it, but the Pen & Internet rep tells me that they are working on an update that will allow you to add words.

My frustration with the Answer List wasn’t a really huge issue, though. One other thing that ritePen does very well is make it easy to select text for editing, so it was a snap to go back and re-enter words that wrong more carefully. Double tapping selects a word, and tap-and-hold transitions into selection mode so that you can select multiple words. This is very easy to do, and makes selecting text for formatting and even drag and drop quite convenient.

I found a few minor bugs, but all of these are scheduled to be fixed in the next update. I have also seen some quirky interactions between ritePen and other pen-enabled applications, but this is really a non-issue since there’s a very convenient system tray icon that allows you to disable ritePen any time you don’t want to use it, such as using web browsers or art applications.

All in all I’m very impressed with ritePen. It hasn’t entirely freed me from the TIP, but it does make pen use more convenient and natural. It’s easy to learn and easy to use and makes a noticeable improvement in the accuracy of handwriting recognition. Since their 30-day trial is a full version, I’d recommend you give it a test drive. Considering that it’s under $20, I the decision to buy it should be an easy one.

--Tucker Hatfield
Technology Editor

ritePen
Pen & Internet
http://pi.parascript.com/piweb/index.asp
$19.95