The Letter Recognizer uses the area at the bottom of the screen called the soft input panel (SIP).
This area is divided into three sections where you will draw your characters. The left third of the SIP is reserved for drawing uppercase characters. The middle section is for lowercase letters, and the right third is for numbers. The far right of the SIP contains buttons for Backspace, Cursor Left, Cursor Right, Return, Space, Help, and Special Characters.
The Letter Recognizer will interpret any characters that you write in the SIP area and put the translated characters into the currently running program wherever the cursor is, just as if you were typing on a keyboard. The dashed line through the middle of the SIP is used to ensure letters can be correctly interpreted. For example, because the uppercase and lowercase forms of some letters look the same when handwritten, to write a lowercase o or c, you should write them below the dashed line Characters with parts that descend below the normal printed line are called descenders. Letters such as lowercase p and q are examples. You should draw them below the dashed line, with the descending part extending below the solid line, Similarly, letters with parts that extend above the dashed line, like b and d, are called ascenders. These should be drawn with the body below the dashed line and the ascender above the line Punctuation can also be entered anywhere in the SIP Letter Recognizer, but it seems to be more effective to use the Special Characters button on the right of the SIP. This button shows three symbols as its icon: @, *, and $. When you tap this button, the SIP changes to show a number of special characters, as shown in the next illustration. You can select the character you want to insert by tapping it with the stylus. As soon as you have selected your character, the panel returns to normal Letter Recognizer mode.
The odd thing that you will need to get used to is that when you are using the Letter Recognizer, you always enter letters as lowercase, even if you want an uppercase letter. To get an uppercase A, you enter a lowercase a in the leftmost section of the SIP. This is counterintuitive and can make the Letter Recognizer a little difficult for new users. It is not our preferred method of input. You can configure some settings to change the way Letter Recognizer behaves and tweak them for your own uses. These settings can be accessed by tapping Options in the input method pop-up menu. (To open this menu, tap the up arrow in the lower-right corner.) The first option is Quick Stroke. Turning this on allows you to write letters with a single stroke of the stylus. This is different from the Graffiti language that is used on the Palm and requires you to learn new ways of writing letters.
The second option is Right To Left Crossbar. You will turn this option on if you are in the habit of putting the horizontal line in letters like t and f from right to left instead of left to right. The third option is Allow Accented Characters. This will allow you to enter characters that use accents such as è (e with a grave accent) in French.

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