Handwriting recognition engine for web application

Question

Hi friends,
I am developing web application using PHP.Client wants to integrate the hand writing recognition engine to our application(Like whatever you written it needs to convert into text format).I don't have any idea on this.Could you please give some suggestion and ideas on how to integrate the engine to PHP.
P.S:Open source is preferable.If not available no problem on the money constraint.

Answer 1

Not a real answer to your question, but Windows XP Tablet, Vista and 7 have this already built in like so:

these controls will pop up when the user taps an input field.

They are bound to be superior to whatever API or library you manage to come up with, because they are trained to their "master's" handwriting, and manage to provide specific input components that are impossible to implement in a web site.

Maybe having clients use this technology can solve part of your problem without any effort on your end - it really depends on the nature of the project.

Also, I found this: Server-side handwriting recognition in Windows 2008 server - maybe you can tap into that through COM, I have no idea.

Answer 2

I may have a solution but I doubt its PHP, its Ruby i believe:

Look here to see if this gets you closer to your goal: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/

Source is available on GitHub: http://github.com/kirel/detexify

Answer 3

As Alexander says - no such software exists (if you could write such a thing then you could retire on the royalties!)

Do you really need handwriting recognition or do you just need to capture an image of what the user writes? The latter is relatively trivial.

C.