Apple 2 manual Data Input

C H A P T E R 6

Data Input

No matter how you have configured recognition for a text field, users can input the wrong type of text if they try hard enough. For example, a user may manage to input numbers where words are the proper type of input.

This happens because every kind of text recognition uses the built-in symbols dictionary, which includes all digits and some punctuation together with all letters of the alphabet. Users have to try hard to input an improper type of text because recognition is weighted towards the proper type of text, and that is what the recognizer usually returns. But if an input stroke is vague enough, the recognizer might return an improper type of text, such as a number instead of a letter. Thus users can manage to write virtually anything in any text field.

Here is a complete list of recognition options that applications can control:

■Allow users to control recognition with a Recognizer button on the status bar, in a slip, or both.

■Separately enable or disable recognition of words, shapes, and editing gestures.

■Recognize words letter-by-letter without using dictionaries.

■Improve recognition of complex stroke groups in which users tend to put large spaces, such as telephone numbers. This is accomplished by disregarding spatial cues (distance between gestures or strokes), and relying solely on temporal cues (time between the end of one stroke and the beginning of the next one) to determine when a user has completed a group of strokes.

■Make the Names dictionary or any other built-in dictionary the primary dictionary. (The Names dictionary contains common names for a user’s locale, not the names contained in the built-in Names application.)

■Use custom dictionaries with specialized words such as product names or plant species.

■Limit word recognition to one or more of the built-in dictionaries (proper names, surnames, first names, names of days and months, names of countries, names of states, names of cities, names of companies, abbrevia- tions of states, common words, and user’s words).

6-20 Writing, Drawing, and Editing