Morphing of Symbols

One way to deal with the slightly cluttered appearance that the shaded and annotated bounding boxes can give is to morph the symbols written by the user to an ideal font or stroke pattern . Littin parses the formula as it is entered, so he is also able to move the symbols on the input area to their correct positions. While this may initially seem appealing as it gives good feedback on what has been entered and causes a cleanly laid out formula to appear in the input window, this method was not used for the following reasons:

• Having the system altering what the user has written could be distracting. It is possible that, as the user writes their formula, the movement of symbols as they are morphed may distract or annoy the user. It has the potential to annoy the user if the morphing happens near where they are writing.
• Visual stroke information is lost. If the system misgroups the strokes and then those strokes are consumed when they are morphed into the ideally formed character, it would require an extra step to unmorph the character before the strokes could be regrouped.

• If the system rearranges the formula, it may not leave enough room for the user to go back and modify the formula later. Because Littin's system only allowed entry around the last few symbols drawn, he left some space around them but closed everything else up. In a system which allows arbitrarily ordered input, the morphing may close up a gap that the user intentionally left to fill in later.

• If the final size of the morphed character is dependent on the original size of what the user wrote, the formula may end up looking like a ransom note due to variations in the sizes of symbols that were written.

• There is nothing wrong with leaving the user's original strokes there anyway. If the goal is to end up with a series of typeset formulae on the input area, perhaps as part of larger a computer algebra system, the morphing could be triggered by a menu selection or pen-based gesture on the user's part.

In spite of this, the morphing of characters is something that could be easily added at a later point. Another alternative is to only morph at the user's request or only once the formula has been successfully parsed. . Littin parses the formula as it is entered, so he is also able to move the symbols on the input area to their correct positions. While this may initially seem appealing as it gives good feedback on what has been entered and causes a cleanly laid out formula to appear in the input window, this method was not used for the following reasons:

• Having the system altering what the user has written could be distracting. It is possible that, as the user writes their formula, the movement of symbols as they are morphed may distract or annoy the user. It has the potential to annoy the user if the morphing happens near where they are writing.
• Visual stroke information is lost. If the system misgroups the strokes and then those strokes are consumed when they are morphed into the ideally formed character, it would require an extra step to unmorph the character before the strokes could be regrouped.

• If the system rearranges the formula, it may not leave enough room for the user to go back and modify the formula later. Because Littin's system only allowed entry around the last few symbols drawn, he left some space around them but closed everything else up. In a system which allows arbitrarily ordered input, the morphing may close up a gap that the user intentionally left to fill in later.

• If the final size of the morphed character is dependent on the original size of what the user wrote, the formula may end up looking like a ransom note due to variations in the sizes of symbols that were written.

• There is nothing wrong with leaving the user's original strokes there anyway. If the goal is to end up with a series of typeset formulae on the input area, perhaps as part of larger a computer algebra system, the morphing could be triggered by a menu selection or pen-based gesture on the user's part.

In spite of this, the morphing of characters is something that could be easily added at a later point. Another alternative is to only morph at the user's request or only once the formula has been successfully parsed.