add support for pen/handwriting input

[mr-salty]

Many moons ago I had the NYT crossword game for Nintendo DS which used pen input and handwriting recognition. I recall it working pretty well and have always missed it.

My Nexus 10 died, and the best available option appeared to be the Samsung S3, which came with a stylus, so it got me thinking about this again.

I know this is likely to be a pretty big project. I'm willing to play around with it, but just I wanted to open a FR for discussion.

[ThatGitJer]

Are you thinking of using the Google handwriting input? I tried this out and it kind-of works, except for blocking the clues and requiring the 'keyboard' to be closed after each letter is written. ;-P

Or do you want the "sensation" of actually writing in the boxes? This could work on a 10" tablet, but anything smaller would likely require some kind of auto-zoom. (I've got a Nexus 7, and with a standard-size puzzle scaled to fit on screen, there's no way I could write in the boxes.)

[mr-salty]

I tried using the handwriting input keyboard (both the Google and Samsung versions) but also found the experience to be less than optimal.

I thought the boxes would be too small to write in even on a 10" tablet but that would be really cool if it could be made to work - and certainly intuitive. I think even the existing keyboard method might work if it either entered the letters in the grid as soon as you wrote them or let you write a word at a time (although the latter could get tedious as the grid fills up).

One idea might be if we kept the notion of a currently selected box and direction and you could just write a letter anywhere on the screen, then it auto-advances to the next box (possibly the next empty box). I think it would take some testing to see what works.

Alas, I'm not sure how to do this - I'm actually kind of surprised that there's no native handwriting API. I see some 3rd party options (phatware, myscript) that look like they require a license. Samsung has an API that looks like it could work but I assume only on their devices. I may play around with that just to see how viable it is.