Aiding Manipulation of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions through Style-Preserving Morphs

We describe a technique for enhancing a user's ability to manipulate hand-printed symbolic information by automatically improving legibility and simultaneously providing immediate feedback on the system's current structural interpretation of the information. Our initial application is a handwriting-based equation editor. Once the user has written a formula, the individual hand-drawn symbols can be gradually translated and scaled to closely approximate their relative positions and sizes in a corresponding typeset version. These transformations preserve the characteristics, or style, of the original userdrawn symbols. In applying this style-preserving morph, the system improves the legibility of the user-drawn symbols by correcting alignment and scaling, and also reveals the baseline structure of the symbols that has been inferred by system. We performed a preliminary user study that indicates that this new method of feedback is a useful addition to a conventional interpretive...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: GRAPHICSINTERFACE
• Authors: Richard Zanibbi, Kevin Novins, James Arvo, Katherine Zanibbi
• Keywords: GRAPHICSINTERFACE 2001, GRAPHICSINTERFACE 2007, Hand-printed Symbolic Information, Individual Hand-drawn Symbols, Original Userdrawn Symbols