17. A method for incremental recognition of ideographic handwriting comprising in order the steps of: (1) entering at least one stroke of an ideographic character from a computer entry tablet; (2) providing said at least one stroke to an incremental character recognizer including a pre-processor and a statistical pattern classifier, said incremental recognizer producing a hypothesis list of at least one candidate character; (3) displaying said hypothesis list of candidate characters containing said at least one stroke; (4) selecting a correct character from among said candidate characters on said hypothesis list if it a correct character appears thereon; (5) entering at least one additional stroke of said ideographic character from said computer entry tablet if no candidate character is a correct character; (6) providing said at least one additional stroke to said incremental character recognizer and producing an updated hypothesis list of at least one candidate character; (7) displaying said updated hypothesis list of candidate characters containing every stroke; (8) selecting a correct character from among said candidate characters on said updated hypothesis list if it a correct character appears thereon; and (9) repeating steps (5) through (8) until a correct character is selected from said updated hypothesis list.
17. A method for incremental recognition of ideographic handwriting comprising in order the steps of: (1) entering at least one stroke of an ideographic character from a computer entry tablet; (2) providing said at least one stroke to an incremental character recognizer including a pre-processor and a statistical pattern classifier, said incremental recognizer producing a hypothesis list of at least one candidate character; (3) displaying said hypothesis list of candidate characters containing said at least one stroke; (4) selecting a correct character from among said candidate characters on said hypothesis list if it a correct character appears thereon; (5) entering at least one additional stroke of said ideographic character from said computer entry tablet if no candidate character is a correct character; (6) providing said at least one additional stroke to said incremental character recognizer and producing an updated hypothesis list of at least one candidate character; (7) displaying said updated hypothesis list of candidate characters containing every stroke; (8) selecting a correct character from among said candidate characters on said updated hypothesis list if it a correct character appears thereon; and (9) repeating steps (5) through (8) until a correct character is selected from said updated hypothesis list. 19. The method of claim 17, wherein said statistical pattern classifier comprises a time-delay neural network.