Patent ID: 8310461

Claim:
A handwriting recognition apparatus, comprising: an electrically driven display integrated with a touch sensitive screen; machine-readable storage containing any of: a character database representing predefined character shape data, the character database and a linguistic database representing predefined character strings; and a processor coupled to the display and storage, the processor programmed to perform operations comprising: receiving a series of multiple strokes via the touch sensitive screen, each stroke defined by a contact, trace, and lift of a stylus or finger or other member; presenting each stroke on the display until occurrence of a prescribed event after which the displayed stroke disappears; accumulating strokes into a buffer and interpreting all accumulated strokes collectively against one of the following to identify multiple candidate strings that could potentially be represented by the accumulated strokes: the character database alone, the character database and the linguistic database, where the operation of interpreting all accumulated strokes comprises: combining input strokes in different ways to produce alternative configurations; for each alternative configuration, comparing stroke input with the character database to produce multiple character candidates and a character distance for each candidate; concatenating said character candidates in different combinations to produce complete candidate strings each comprising a potential representation of user-intended strokes from start to end; and producing a ranked list of the complete candidate strings according to a score of each candidate string, where scores are produced by weighing the distances of the concatenated characters and string likeliness according to said linguistic database such that strings that are more likely to represent the accumulated strokes are ranked higher and strings that are less likely to represent the accumulated strokes or absent from the linguistic database are ranked lower, where said ranking is dependent upon string length such that long strings that have a given linguistic likelihood are promoted more than short strings of the given linguistic likelihood; the operations further comprising: operating the display to present candidate strings for user selection, the candidate strings being displayed upon one of the following basis: (1) only after all strokes have disappeared, (2) only after receiving a predefined user submitted delimiter, (3) only after a predetermined delay has elapsed following user entry of a most recent stroke.