Notices

I have an idea:

In Diablo the OS can detect whether you used the stylus or your finger when activating a text input field (I think it uses some type of pressure sensitivity measuring).

So maybe make xournal also detect:

If it is a finger then it should scroll the screen.

If it is a stylus it should be writing.

Depending on how the detection works, if there is some way to detect whether the user is touching the screen with two fingers (like the touchpad of the EEE, detects two fingers for scrolling) , that would be even better as then you can use that for scrolling while still enabling people to write, using one finger (if they are to lazy to whip out the stylus :-) ).

Thanks Jaem!

Perhaps I can write some code (pseudo or other) to distinguish blocks of 'words' (or scribbles) based on proximity as to define a bounding box around a 'word'.

My first thought is to bound each complete stroke. If that stroke is a certain proximity to the bounds of another stroke, its bound is added to the bound of the stroke that is close. Paper lines separate strokes and make it easy to determine which line a stroke is on, as not to attach it to a stroke that is very close vertically. If a stroke is horizontally out of reach of another stroke, a new bound is started.

Something spatial like a simple implementation of an R-Tree can hold a quick lookup of all strokes on a page with very little memory/computation for quick bound comparison. I'm not sure how much it would cost (computationally) to augment a bound in the tree (possible tree re-build?), but a solution should be possible (ie. a separate structure to hold the augmented bound results).

A whole slew of neat features can follow from there.

As point of interest: isolating strokes and their proximal bounds should make it easy to determine character patterns which could be a step towards reliable character recognition and almost more importantly, word recognition. Please note: I'm thinking about unjoined 'printed' characters and not cursive.

Of course I could also code a function/method/class or two provide features like justification, wrapping, etc.

Would this help?

}:^)~

I would be happy to help you out with those icons, I can whip some up on the weekend and have em ready for review on monday. Just let me know the size / format specs.

TTS is real! And it should work quite well on Maemo 5. A 'popular' open implementation is called flite.

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/

}:^)~

This can be done.
It should be easy and I'll bind it to an action called "CarriageReturn" then whoever wants it has to simply add it to his own personalized toolbar.
ATM you've got to edit the .xml file that comes with Xournal.

Bear with me that all these new features will come after it's been stable on Fremantle.

Off to work.

I made a new pencil check it out:

You good at icons?
Would you be so king to make them more "Maemo 5"-like?

You notice their style from the "fullscreen" icon.
(just plain white on black background and flat)

They'll be loaded from .png files, so changeable.

Would it make more sense a STT (speech to text) for Xournal?

What's the point of writing notes, have them recognized (OCR) and then synthesized ?
You can write notes with the nice keyboard or you can store your voice with an audio recorder.

Anyway, I never came across a good library that accepts handwriting and coverts to text.

Never really made icons before, but I get photoshop, that pencil I just made now. I'll try making a "maemo 5" style icon for the pencil then we can decide which style to go with. I'm going to copy the style from the close button, so it will be a gradient/monochrome/block style.

They're more like the last icon in my screenshot, the white square with an arrow in it.