Aiptek Tablet and Chinese handwriting recognition

There are many way to type Chinese, however, arguably, the most natural way is handwriting. Windows has handwriting recognition software bundled for a long time now ... and today, I finally find a way to get something similar setup on Ubunut 9.10

Below are the items you need to make it happen.

1. a tablet.
2. a Java runtime
3. HanziInput

The tablet I am using is a cheap rebranded tablet that using Aiptek Tablet. By default, Ubuntu can't really make full use of it. To make it useful, you need to

1) install aiptek driver by

sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-input-aiptek

2) create a 10-linuxaiptek.fdi with the contents as below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" contains="Aiptek">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">aiptek</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.USB" type="string">On</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Type" type="string">stylus</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Mode" type="string">absolute</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.zMin" type="string">0</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.zMax" type="string">511</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.KeepShape" type="string">On</merge>
</match>
</device>

(ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AiptekTablet)

3) place the 10-linuxaiptek.fdi into the directory /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/

4) restart the system, and plug in the tablet.

Once you have things setup, you should be able to run the HanziInput.jar, and use the tablet for writing as below.