Communicating Mathematics via Pen-Based Interfaces

We address the question of how to organize pen-based interfaces for mathematical software systems, both for computational mathematics packages and document processing software. Our architecture includes components for ink collection, mathematically-oriented recognizers, portability support and interfaces to applications. We summarize aspects of mathematical handwriting recognition and discuss the methods we have used for individual character recognition and overall expression analysis. We present our pen-based computing environment, Mathink, and give an overview of facilities for training, ink annotation, and testing.