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. 23. The method of claim 17, wherein said candidate characters have an order and wherein said step of producing an updated hypothesis list includes the step of re-ordering at least one of said candidate characters on said updated hypothesis list.