A few days ago the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 Recognizer Pack was released.　This is great news for everyone who was too lazy to roll back XP SP2 to install the previous version.

But this is a new version so even if you installed the pre-SP2 Recogniser Pack you should install this update (don't worry, it installs right over the old version).

The writing pad (as opposed to the character pad) now works in Japanese. It has some interesting characteristics like sizing the recognised characters as they are written. At first I found this somewhat annoying, but it should teach me to write with some consistency. There are some problems too: if the first thing I write is い I can sometimes end up with (). Although this is my own fault, it can be quite difficult to correct.

Most recognisers have been renamed - so what was previously the "Microsoft Japanese Handwriting Recognizer" is now "Microsoft 日本語手書き認識エンジン". Thus relying on the Name property of the Recognizer object is no longer sufficient.

Somehow I missed the announcement but this Recognizer Pack can be installed on non-tablet operating systems (for development and testing)! Hopefully this means we will see a significant increase in the number of developers working with the Tablet PC platform.