Pen out-of-proximity handwriting-recognition trigger
View Patent ↗In a computer system that accepts handwritten input, a digitizer tracks the location of a user's pen while the pen is not in contact with the digitizer's writing surface. The digitizer maps the pen's three-dimensional location into a two-dimensional location on the digitizer's writing surface. Handwriting-recognition is triggered for handwriting entered into a handwriting-recognition task area upon detecting that the user has lifted the pen off of the digitizer's writing surface and that the pen has moved out of proximity from the handwriting-recognition task area. The handwriting-recognition triggering may be inhibited when the pen is down and in contact with the digitizer's writing surface in an inking orientation.
1. A method of triggering handwriting recognition, the method comprising:
determining that a pen has moved up from an inking position to a non-inking position;
mapping the pen's location onto a writing surface while the pen is in the non-inking position and is separated from the writing surface by a distance that is greater than zero and less than or equal to a maximum trackable distance;
determining that the pen's mapped location on the writing surface has moved from inside a handwriting-recognition task area to outside of the handwriting-recognition task area; and
triggering handwriting recognition for handwriting entered in the handwriting-recognition task area based upon determining that the pen has moved up from the inking position into the non-inking position and that the pen's mapped location on the writing surface has moved from inside the handwriting-recognition task area to outside of the handwriting-recognition task area.
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
inhibiting handwriting-recognition triggering when the pen is in the inking position.
3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
triggering handwriting recognition if the pen remains in a non-inking position for longer than a handwriting-recognition-trigger timeout duration.
4. A computer system that accepts handwritten input, the system comprising:
a pointing device;
a writing surface that maps a location of the pointing device onto the writing surface while the pointing device is less than or equal to a maximum-trackable distance away from the writing surface;
a handwriting-recognition-trigger module that receives pointing-device-location data and triggers handwriting recognition when the received pointing-device-location data indicates that the pointing device's mapped location on the writing surface has gone from inside a handwriting task area to outside of a handwriting task area and that the pointing device has transitioned from an inking orientation to a non-inking orientation.
5. The system of claim 4 wherein:
the pointing device is selected from the group consisting of: a pen, a mouse, and a trackball; and
the writing surface is a writing surface of a digitizer.
6. The system of claim 5 wherein:
the digitizer detects when the pen is farther away from the digitizer than the maximum-trackable distance; and
the handwriting-recognition-trigger module triggers handwriting recognition upon receiving an indication that the digitizer has detected that the pen is farther away from the digitizer than the maximum-trackable distance.