Frequently Asked Questions
What is STIHRS?
STIHRS is an open source handwriting recognition program.
When will the next release be?
STIHRS version 0.2.1 will be released when Mac OS X support is finished. This will hopefully happen sometime in the near future.
What will be in the next release?
The next version of STIHRS will mainly include the addition of Mac support. It may also contain other bug fixes and new features.
Why are you choosing to support Mac and not Linux?
This is mainly being done so that both of the project's current developers can easily work on it. However, we intend to add Linux support as well sometime in the future.
Why can't the program recognize my handwriting when I first use the program?
The way it is designed now, STIHRS starts out with no knowledge of any handwriting at all. So, in order for it to be able to read any letter, you must first train it with that letter. This allows it to be more universal, but we realize that it is convenient for it to already have background knowledge, so we plan to add that feature in the future.
Do I have to teach the program my handwriting from scratch every time I run it?
No. Every time you close the program, it should create a file called writers.dat that contains all of the information about your handwriting. Every time that you start the program, it reads from writers.dat to get the old information. This means that if you want to transfer the knowledge of your handwriting to another computer, you can just copy writers.dat to the same directory as stihrs.exe, and the program should automatically load all of the information about your handwriting.
Can the program recognize cursive handwriting, or do I have to print?
Right now, the program does not recognize cursive, nor does it recognize printing where the letters run together. Our current process of breaking down a word into letters is somewhat simple, so it simply does not work for cursive writing. We hope to fix this problem in a later release.