Mathieu’s log

Today I’m releasing Tegaki 0.1. Tegaki is an ongoing project which aims to develop a free and open-source modern implementation of handwriting recognition software, that is suitable for both the desktop and mobile devices, and that is designed from the ground up to work well with Chinese and Japanese.

Screencast video: ogg or youtube.

This release features desktop and SCIM integration. However, the main “innovation” brought to you by this release is the user interface. It uses two drawing areas for continuous writing. The user can eventually fix recognition errors by choosing alternative candidates or editing characters. Since a video is worth a thousand words, see the screencast above. This interface is largely inspired from the Nintendo DS game “Kanji Sono Mama Rakubiki Jiten” (漢字そのまま楽引辞典).

Tegaki is designed to be able to use several recognition engines. However so far it only supports Zinnia, which is the only recognition engine that I know with acceptable recognition accuracy and good performance on mobile devices. One challenge of the project in the future will be to create a new recognition engine that can yield better results than Zinnia.

A take that I have on this project is to use Python whenever this is possible and only use C or C++ when performance is critical, like in recognition engines. Compared to Tomoe, which implements everything in C and provides bindings for several languages, this means less reusability of the components but I hope this will make the project go forward faster.

There are still a lot of things that can be done in various areas but I really wanted to release the code I’ve put together so far because I think it can already be useful to end-users. By the way, Maemo supports both pygtk and SCIM through third-party projects, thus Tegaki is just a few Debian packages away from being available on Maemo.

For further details:
http://tegaki.sourceforge.net/

I was checking the web to see whether it’s possible to write an input method for SCIM using Python (the answer was yes), and I found ibus. ibus is a new input framework, by the author of SCIM himself. A particularity is that most of the core seems to be written in Python, which is interesting for such a low level thing as an input method.

Input methods like ibus-pinyin, ibus-anthy are thus written directly in Python. It should be pretty easy to integrate Zinnia into ibus then! (using the canvas widget provided by libtegaki-gtk)

- ibus @ Google Code
- Ibus @ Github