Decent handwriting recognition would help here - not as a full substitute, but as a lightweight alternative.
Though I cannot imagine it working within the confines of the keyboard HID API.
With non-defective keyboards (and non-spazzy hands), the key presses on a keyboard are non-probabilistic; that's not the case with handwriting, where a large amount of the information regarding how to interpret text comes from the surrounding characters - including those that follow.
You'd need to deal with the shifting probabilities of text input, and without introducing user noticable latency or triggering an excess of events.
It doesn't sound impossible, but it wouldn't be easy either.
Even ipad handwriting recognition has weak points. For example, a q by itself will almost always turn into a 9. I wonder if PDAs had it right after all and we need to adapt our characters to make them more easily understood by machines.
My handwriting, because of a life of typing (this year is my 40th year of 10 finger touch typing; I was 8 when I got my certificate, so I basically skipped writing), is horrible and only I can read it. The iPad cannot, at all.
You remind me of a Windows CE PDA I had in the late 90s through early 00s [0] that had a pen stylus and consistently amazed me that it could flawlessly interpret my scrawly scribbles perfectly - I'm hard to please but it always amazed me and I felt in awe.
My experience with every hand-writing recognition facility since has been it has got worse, more opinionated, and is probably tied too tightly to grammar and spell checking - rather like what I call "destructive texting" when predictive typing on mobile devices constantly auto-replaces words after I've typed them without me noticing until a message is sent!
[0] I still have it although not powered up in a couple of years!
Out of context, a q and a 9 might be hard to distinguish; but all you need (in context) to tell them apart is where they appear vertically in the line that they're on.
Though I cannot imagine it working within the confines of the keyboard HID API.
With non-defective keyboards (and non-spazzy hands), the key presses on a keyboard are non-probabilistic; that's not the case with handwriting, where a large amount of the information regarding how to interpret text comes from the surrounding characters - including those that follow.
You'd need to deal with the shifting probabilities of text input, and without introducing user noticable latency or triggering an excess of events.
It doesn't sound impossible, but it wouldn't be easy either.