Cool online symbol recognizer

Philipp Kühl and Daniel Kirsch have created a browser-based symbol recognizer, called Detexify2.

The online recognizer makes it possible for you to draw a wide variety of symbols that LaTeX supports and then recognizes them for you and displays one or symbols that match your drawing. From my 15 minute tests it seems quite accurate.

The online applet requires HTML 5, so you’ll need a browser like Google Chrome. I’m using the beta and it seems to work just fine.

Why HTML 5 you ask? Because it’s using the new canvas tag as a surface that you can draw on. The “ink” is then passed along to its classifier. Yes, you could use Silverlight or Flash or some other technology, but what you have here is an approach that I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of, namely using “simple” HTML, albeit HTML 5.

Really, why can’t a web page support drawing more directly anyway?

By the way, don’t let the handwritten graphic on the web page give you the wrong notion here: The canvas surface doesn’t support pressure sensitivity. The graphic is a png that was probably drawn using Photoshop or some other app. It would be cool, though, if the canvas element supported pressure sensitivity.