STROKE BASED CONTROL OF HANDWRITING INPUT

The subject technology provides for stroke based control of handwriting input. The disclosed stroke based control facilitates selection, copy, paste, search, data detection and other operations for handwritten electronic text. The selection of text represented by handwritten strokes can be performed without drawing a lasso or other loop around the desired text, by using known boundaries of words and phrases in stroke space. Selection of text in this manner allows copy and/or paste of recognized words or phrases, of images of the words or phrases, and/or of the strokes themselves. Boundaries, in stroke space, of actionable data represented by the strokes can also allow action options to be provided when a user interacts with strokes within the boundary.