Disappointed by the current state-of-the-art in handwriting 
recognition (HWR) ? 
Have you ever wished for a high-accuracy HWR system that would
enable  a host of ÒintelligentÓ devices, including phones,
portables,  PDAs, portable wireless communication devices,
etc.? Well, here is your chance to contribute towards the
development of the best high-accuracy HWR system of the 
future!

All it takes is a Newton MessagePad, the Connection Kit, and
about one hour of your time! Do it today; see the results in 
the next generation of HWR devices!

Type Solutions, Inc. announces the availability of our 
digital handwriting sample collector. We have been working
on the next generation of handwriting recognition technology
since 1993. We have overcome many hurdles along the
way to high-accuracy recognition of "natural" writing and 
a few hurdles remain. One of these hurdles isthe gathering 
of a significant sized database of writing samples. 

Clearly, the ability of a computer-trained system to 
recognize handwriting can be no better than the database
of examples available for training that system. It is in
this area that we are turning to you, the current base of
Newton users, for assistance. Whether the Newton's built-in
recognizer works very well for you, or whether you find it
next to unusable, we would like to have you submit a sample
of your handwriting for our growing database of handwriting
examples.

Quite simply, the quality of our recognition seems to be
bound by two factors, the underlying architecture, which we
are working constantly to improve, and the size of the
database available for training and evaluation of the system.
Very high-accuracy can be obtained, but we need your help!

Total time required should be approximately one hour; 
Equipment and software required are a Newton device, the
Newton Connection Kit 2.0, and our software (available from
ftp://newton.uiowa.edu/submissions/NewtCollector1.1.sit (Mac)
ftp://newton.uiowa.edu/submissions/NewtCollector1.1.zip (PC)
It is also available on AOL (keyword PDA), and soon will be
available on other major on-line services)

A PCMCIA RAM card is desirable, but not strictly necessary.
Complete instructions are included within a help-book in
our application. A separate app serves to "clean up" the
soups and directory entries inserted by our collector app.
Thus, when you are done, run the clean-up app, and your
Newton will have no soups leftover or other RAM consumers
from our applications.

Thank you for your time in reading this, and hopefully in
donating a sample of handwriting.

Questions: E-mail typesol@mv.mv.com, phone (603) 382-6400
and ask for Jim.

---Jim Sokoloff, Type Solutions, Inc.

Note: This file is a bug-fix release. The 1.0 version had a
non-fatal bug which caused an error -48024 to appear. 
Version 1.1 fixes this problem.