From: ericbe@microsoft.com (Eric Berman)
Subject: Re: PenWindows Recognition Speed
Date: 07 Oct 92 17:08:30 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Corporation

In article <1992Oct5.074553.389@eng.ufl.edu> george@delta.ee.ufl.edu (George L) writes:
>Judging from the tone of your post, I would say that you might want to try 
>changing the PenWindows Recognition Delay setting. I think this is in the 
>Pen Pallette application, (but I don't have PenWindows on this system so I 
>can't verify this now).

Close; it's in the Handwriting control panel.  This should do it; most of
the delay you are seeing is, in fact, the recognizer sitting around waiting
for a pause in your writing.  Just for fun, you might want to try setting
the timeout to 0.  It's amusing, but unusable, since you can't accurately
dot i's or cross t's, and you get a lot of spurious double-taps.  Personally,
I go for about a second--5 right-arrow clicks up from no delay.

>Which raises a valid question. MicroSoft will not sell PenWindows directly 
>to an individual. They say it is the responsibility of the hardware merchant 
>to provide it. However, while some lower cost pen input device suppliers 
>have PenWindows drivers written, they are afraid to invest in thousands of 
>copies of the full PenWindows extensions software packages.
>
>Why? One reason I have heard, is that they are afraid MicroSoft will include 
>the extensions in their next revision of Windows (as MS apparently did with 
>some of their multi-media extensions). This would leave the small hardware 
>developers stuck with a lot of unsalable software packages.

Well, I'm not a spokesman for MS (and I don't even play one on TV), but I'll
try to address this anyhow.  As for the "thousands of packages" deal, I think
you have the model wrong here.  We (MS) give these vendors a big tape with
Windows and Windows for Pens on it, and they, in turn pay us a royalty on
each *copy* of that that they ship.  There is no shrink-wrapped package that
they have to purchase from us and store in a warehouse somewhere; they can
duplicate just as many disks as they need and no more.  

Documentation works in pretty much the same way: we give them an electronic
version of the docs and they print it out themselves, or they can buy
individual copies of it from a publisher.  Again, there is no need to stock
up a warehouse with inventory.

The main reason we don't sell W4P directly to individuals is that it is of
little use to you if you don't have a tablet.  Yeah, you can use it with a
mouse, but primarily the people who want to do that are developers who want
to try it out before taking the plunge.  Not enough end users who don't have
tablets are asking for this to justify the expense of creating an end-user
package.

Soo...you should be able to get it from your tablet vendor either free or
real cheap.

As for MS includding the pen extensions in future releases of Windows,
I think that this is *very* likely to happen; it makes a lot  

>So, even though I have a pen tablet, and pen interface controls (that I 
>shelled out extra bucks to get in the VB Professional Toolkit), I can't use 
>it since I don't have PenWindows on this machine. I know someone will say 
>that all I need to get is the full Win3.1 SDK, which has some of the files.
>But now we are talking about even more money, and for something I don't really 
>need for this application.
>
>Can someone from MS offer a solution?

Again, you should be able to get the penwin disks from your tablet vendor
very cheaply.  If you have problems, give me a buzz (ericbe@microsoft.com)
and I'll see what I can do to help you (don't forget to tell me your vendor's
name).

Hope that helps!

--Eric