Pictographic naming

We describe pictographic naming, a new approach to naming for pen-based computers, in which filenames are pictures rather than ASCII strings. Handwriting recognition (HWX) of a name is delayed as long as possible. We show that most file system operations can be accomplished without HWX. Since pictographic names are sets of strokes, they can never be reproduced exactly so name lookup becomes an approximate matching problem. We give efficient algorithms for this problem, and present results for name matching in English and Japanese.