THE TILTED MONITOR

Much to the distress of my high school typing teacher, I taught myself to type when I was in grade school, using an old Underwood upright office machine that was a few years older than me. I did this out of self defense. You see, my handwriting is, well, abominable. Do a Web search for "illegible" and you probably will be sent to a sample of my "penmanship". As a reporter, I never worried about some court demanding to see my notes. Heck, after three days, even I can't read them. So, to preserve first my grades and then my career, I began doing everything possible on a typewriter at an early, early age. For those of you too young to know, those old manual typewriters had a key return of about six inches and required on the order of 9 pounds of pressure per square millimeter if you hoped to coax one more letter image out of a raggedy old ribbon. But I became good at it - even fast. Naturally, I hated electrics when they came along. It was like stuttering on paper. By the time I released a key, I had a full line of nothing but that letter. So, in high school, college and early in my professional life, I opted for a manual whenever I could. ...our clients and I had the rare pleasure of reading my stuff together for the first time. This served me well in my first few years with United Press International, where I had to punch my stories into paper tape using a teletype keyboard, which was a first cousin to my old Underwood. And I was greased lightning on it - accurate greased lightning, I might add. Then, about 1973, UPI pulled the old teletypes and gave us . . . computers. Well, workstations, actually. For the first time, I was able to see - even correct - my copy before it went out on the client wires. Prior to that, our clients and I had the rare pleasure of reading my stuff together for the first time. Eventually, of course, came computers and my two manuals - the old Underwood and a Roaring Twenties era portable I used to take to cover football games - now stand as museum pieces alongside some of my early computers. But throughout all this, taking notes, such as during an interview, remained a matter of ink and paper - and what began as merely bad handwriting deteriorated after I took shorthand in high school and Russian in college. You see, I tend to put on paper whatever comes out first as I attempt to keep up with the person who is talking. That means my notes are a mishmash of Cyrillic characters, shorthand squiggles, my own unique - and highly inconsistent - abbreviations, all in my patented unreadable scrawl. This is why I have always transcribed my notes as quickly as possible, before I can forget what the heck was said. I've become quite adept at that, but it is not one of my favorite activities. Which, by way of long introduction, brings us to the first real effort to combine old-fashioned note-taking with modern computer technology. This is not writing on a digitized pad with a stylus, this is writing on regular notepad paper with regular ink. But not a regular ink pen. It is, by the way, a very nice pen, as you might expect from Cross, We are talking here of the CrossPad portable digital notepad and a very special Cross digital pen that transmits its movements across the paper to a computer chip in the electronic pad to which you have attached your paper notepad. What you see is what you've always seen - words scribbled in ink on paper. But inside the pad, the computer is collecting all those movements for later uploading to your computer, an extremely quick and simple process using IBM's Ink Manager software.

It is, by the way, a very nice pen, as you might expect from Cross, well-balanced, with heft but not bulky or unwieldy. And it has its own little storage slot atop the digital pad. Obviously, this is handwriting recognition, not a subject of great repute during its formative years. And it means the first thing you have to do is work with the training pad, a notepad of several pages of training materials. You just write down on the lines provided what is typed My problem is, I never know exactly what I will use to represent any given word. above them, then upload that to the computer (in training mode), then review what you have written against what the computer expects to find. You can edit either the script or the typed words to make certain they match exactly. The program then "learns" that that undecipherable squiggle actually means "correlate" and so will type "correlate" the next time it encounters said squiggle in an upload from the digital pad. Now, the good news here is the program doesn't really care what your letters look like or even if they are letters. If you take all your notes in shorthand, then use shorthand in the training sessions and the program will translate accordingly. My problem is, I never know exactly what I will use to represent any given word. For example, during a single note-taking session, I may write the same word in shorthand in one place, in Russian in another, maybe in German or Spanish in a third and in English in yet another - all in the aforementioned scrawl, of course. Needless to say, this has a tendency to confuse handwriting recognition programs, which is why the manual strongly suggests you be consistent in how you write, even if it is just consistently sloppy. But using completely different scrawls to mean the same thing is a problem. Still, Ink Manager does its best. If you use all of the training pages - about half an inch thick - it has a far better chance. Several people can use the same Ink Manager software by creating different user names for each, then telling the program which user is uploading from the CrossPad. Once a "notebook", as the contents of an upload are called, is on the computer, you can simply erase it from the CrossPad and you're ready for your next note-taking session. Nor is the CrossPad limited to text. If you want to draw something on the notepad, simply use the picture tool to draw a box around that area after uploading to the computer but before sending the upload to handwriting recognition. The CrossPad also lets you place bookmarks and keywords into your notes by pressing the appropriate key on the pad's control panel. These can be modified once you upload to Ink Manager and used as indexing and search tools. You also can add descriptive text to each uploaded notebook to help you identify what is in those notes for future reference. There are two versions: The standard CrossPad ($299) which uses 8.5x11 inch paper, and the CrossPad XP ($249) which uses the "junior" legal pad size notebooks. So, does it work? Well, I'm probably the toughest test it has ever faced and it did encounter problems, but it also managed to handle the bulk of my scribblings. The result is I no longer have to keypunch every single word of my notes. Now I just scan the conversion for obvious trouble spots, check the original hand-written notes, make the necessary corrections and move on. The result is a dramatic time savings that still gives me an opportunity to review my notes in full. But don't tell anybody who might want to subpoena any of my notes - they can still have the hand-written stuff, but let's keep what the CrossPad saw our little secret, eh? Copyright © 1999 J R Wilson