CompuServe Messages

That's not what they're talking about, though – they are saying that there are methods that have been developed to deal with handwritten input at the time it is written; not _after_ it is written. As far as I know, there is NO way at this time to reliably recognize arbitrary script or text without significant training of the recognition software; even then the end results can be very poor unless there is a very high degree of uniformity between all the text groups, such as machine-generated fonts will provide (usually). What is currently called "OCR" for Optical Character Recognition should probably be OCG, for Optical Character Guesswork. :^) I agree that for computers to input masses of old data, OCR (not OCG) is needed. However, I still don't think that recognizing hadwriting is particularly useful; and however useful it is now, will probably end shortly; typing has become one of the basic skills, and it will soon be far more important than "writing", IMHO. If this does NOT happen, it'll be a shame, and a symbol of the weakness of our culture. In any case, we have no plans to add OCG or WR (Writing Recognition) to the NoteBook. A better thing to do would be to use an external program to recognize the data you need looked at (if indeed such s/w ever becomes available) and then feed the resulting ASCII file into NoteBook via the text import. Ben