Touch-typing with a stylus
David Theo Goldberg, Cate Richardson · 1993
One of the attractive features of keyboards is that they support novice as well as expert users.Novice users enter text using "hunt-and-peck," experts use touch-typing.Although it takes time to learn touch-typing, there is a large payoff in faster operation.In contrast to keyboarda, pen-based computers have only a novice mode for text entry in which users print text to a character recognize.An electronic pen (or stylus) would be more attractive as an input device if it supported expert users with some analogue of touch-typing.We present the design and preliminary analysis of an approach to stylus touch-typing using an alphabet of unistrokes, which are letters specially designed to be used with a stylus.Unistrokes have the following advantages over ordinary printing they are faster to write, less prone to recognition error, and can be entered in an "eyes-free" manner that requires very little screen real estate.