—Calligraphic data entry is accelerated by generating, with a feature-based character classifier, an ordered list of reference candidate labels for each character image. The improvement of labeling throughput depends on the top-N accuracy of the classifier, which in turn is a function of the available already-labeled patterns. Experiments on a database of 13,351 ancient calligraphic characters indicate that clicking on reference labels is more than twice as fast as Pinyin keyboard entry. Keywords-calligraphy, computer-aided labeling, shape-based recognition, top-N classification