Onyx on-screen keyboard handwriting (Settings)

[Markismus]

I am quite taken with the handwriting input of the Onyx keyboard on my Note 5. It doesn't demand that I write beautiful, but I do have to take care to write somewhat clearly. E.g. To recognize seem and not seen actually demands that I write the m fully at the end.

A drawback is that I can't just continue writing and expect Onyx to take care of it. I write a few words. Onyx recognizes them and deletes the pen strokes. I write a few words.

However, the biggest drawback is that it hangs sometimes. Switching between keyboard and handwriting usually works. Sometimes. it doesn't.

So that's where the ONYX Keyboard Settings would come in. Under the heading Handwriting input I find the settings:

1. Automatically add spaces to English handwriting recognition
2. Handwriting Stroke Effect
3. The time of lifting the stylus.
4. Stroke line width setting
5. Custom handwriting vocabulary

Setting 1. seems to work for Dutch, too. So it actually seems to state add spaces to non-Chinese handwriting recognition. (Or hopefully to non-logogram based languages.)
Setting 2. seems to impact the thickness of the strokes that I write. So no idea what function this has.
Setting 3. controls the trigger time before recognition kicks in. Ideally it would be at the end of a sentence. If you set it to 5000ms, I find that I am waiting to often before recognition starts. If I set it to 325ms the triggering of the recognition holds me from writing the 4th or 5th word.
Setting 4 controls the thickness of the strokes. 10 is very thick.
Setting 5 seems to allow to add a custom vocabulary for installed languages. You can input them manually though the settings. However, I sincerely that the list populates itself through use with the keyboard. For now I see two words: Abiud and bund. No idea how they got there.

So there seems little room to tweak it or address my problems. Playing around with the time of lifting certainly has an impact. However, I find myself reverting back to 1000ms, because it doesn't really improve the freezes or the prevention of writing the next word.

Does anyone have a better workaround for the freezes or a prevention? Does anyone know what the Handwriting Stroke Effect does?

[jljtgr]

I wish that Gboard was optimized in the same way that OneNote, etc was. Its handwriting recognition is super fast and happens on the device as far as I can tell. But the drawing lag is distracting. I have to try hard to ignore the fact that what I'm writing won't appear until several letters later.

[Markismus]

@jljtgr Thanks! Never registered the handwriting keyboard layout of Gboard. I actually switched to Onyx keyboard for the handwriting! So now I can switch back.

There is little to no lag on Gboard on the Notes. However, the lines being drawn flicker tremendously! How can.we reduce that? It seems impossible to switch to another screen mode for Gboard only.

Also, the line drawn is rather thick. If we could change that, the writing is more readable and can be smaller.

I can't find any setting to control the Gboard handwriting? Do the settings exists?

EDIT:
Can't find anything on Google. However, some iPhone users complained about flickering and switched to Swiftkey.

Apparently, they also have handwriting. It seems that The Impressive Thing about Onyx Keyboard is that they create awareness about handwriting input...

[jljtgr]

Regarding pen width... open the Gboard app, go to Languages, tap the Handwriting keyboard you've added and change the Handwriting stroke width. "Extra thin" is like 3.0pt pen whereas "Normal" is like 12pt. Definitely better than nothing.

I'm not entirely sure I'm seeing the flickering you're speaking of on Gboard. I'll take a look at SwiftKey, but I doubt it will do better for the line drawing lag that I'm seeing.

[Markismus]

SwiftKey doesn't support handwriting for English or Dutch or German. It does support handwriting for Chinese (HK). So it's useless for me.

[Markismus]

After decreasing the width to fine, I got the lag, too. Using the thick width the line flickers before becoming solid, using fine width is appears after a lag.
There is no impact of the Eink settings: If I set it to X for the Gboard app, it doesn't change the flicker or lag of the handwriting.
I am still unsure about the writing speed setting. I've changed the setting from normal to mid-fast and saw no impact, yet.

[jljtgr]

I might have been imagining things, but I thought the writing speed setting in Gboard affected how long it waited after your last stroke before moving your writing to the left so you'd have more space to write in.