A Pen-Based Interface for Real-Time Document Edition

This article presents a pen-based framework for manual edition of digital documents on tablet computers. In this system, the user draws certain proofreading symbols on the text parts to edit; some symbols can be accompanied by handwritten text. The input is interpreted and the corresponding editing action is executed in real time. The possibility that the input contains handwritten text is a novelty with respect to previous real-time systems that faced sketch-based edition, where usually text input is carried out via keyboard. Also, multimodal feedback mechanisms for error recovery are present. In this work we focus on the symbol recognition part. Different features are evaluated in recognition experiments using a support vector machine classifier. Experiments show that the symbol recognition is efficient enough for a real-time task and that the system can be used in real conditions with some experience.