Cheers,
Dmitry.

Fred

Best,
Savan

what did you try – InftyEditor or Infty Reader?

Cheers,
Dmitry.

Its would be really useful gadgets if it did work. I tried to convert a page in Coleman’s QFT lecture note and it gave me real silly stuff. I am not discouraging the technology, but its really hard for me to see how this would evolve into a something which would make things less time consuming. Anyways, I hope I am wrong.

Best,

Savan

I just checked the PDF annotator website, and I am very surprised the price has gone up by that much! I paid 30 euros for the same software in late Nov 08. For me, that’s been one very noteworthy investment, considering I have lots of ebooks in pdf (not to mention the large N preprints that populate my desktop). Anyway, a quick google search easily reveals a non-empty set of possibly useful free annotator applications.

Best, TM

My experience shows that several (even few) years do matter – progress goes fast nowadays. For example, recall how much handwriting recognition sucked back in Win XP years (if you tried that with Vafa’s tablet). Vista was quite a difference indeed – for example, in Vista handwriting recognition engine is able to learn and recognize your writing better with time (WinXP Tablet PC edition did not support learning).

On the other hand, I follow Suzuki group for a couple of years already and I do see that the recognition ability of their software is getting better… So, I would say – in a couple of years we will have this technology at least at the same level text handwriting recognition is now (of course, if demand will be high enough).

Cheers,
Dmitry.

thanks for pointing that out, I did not try Windows 7 yet. I do have a strong suspicion that Math Input Panel does not quite yet provide the functionality we need (see Lubos’ comment below) when writing papers

Cheers,
Dmitry.

I’ve checked PDF Annotator out, unfortunately, it isn’t free. So it seems that the only option for people who want Annotator functionality for free is FoxIt.

Thanks for the link to Gordon Watts’ post!

Dmitry.

However, I don’t believe that recognizing complicated handwritten data – like math equations – is a good idea that will be used in a systematic way in the future. There are too many things that may be misunderstood by the computer, too many conventions that the computer might misunderstand.

It still seems to me as a good pressure that humans are forced to rewrite equations in a mechanical LaTeX/MathML way by the computers. For example, if you look at the

http://www.gottabemobile.com/2.....reenshots/

link above, there are four equations. They’ve been surely optimized to be showable on the blog. Still, are they correctly interpreted? Not at all. Note that the square root in the solution of the quadratic equation (last eqn) doesn’t include “c” at the end which is left outside the square root: a wrong formula follows immediately and almost no one except for me would even notice.

This particular thing wouldn’t happen with hard TeX/MathML writing because there would be no reason to divide “a”, “c” inside/outside the square root. And the syntactically OK formulae that could be obtained by a mistake would look very different, and could be seen as mistakes.

Otherwise, Windows 7 is nice – I’ve tried it for a few hours now – but it is not that different from Vista, after all.

http://www.gottabemobile.com/2.....reenshots/

Thanks for the link to Infty; I’ll check it out. The math recognition in Windows 7 works well for me, but I’m interested to see about other formats that are supported besides MathML.

One thing that will, I’m sure, greatly please you is to learn that you can have all your favourite reference/text books right on your tablet, for free! I left some comments at Gordon Watt’s post, so you might go and have a read there Have fun!