My girlfriend recently received a new bamboo tablet for Christmas, and we were wondering if there are any native apps on linux that will allow entering characters quickly, e.g. when taking notes. Cell writer allows entering characters and placing them in a document afterwards, and she could of course use a blank page on GIMP, but we were looking for something a bit more intuitive.

Are there any programs that would allow her to simply write on the tablet without having to check on the screen to see if she was off the side of a page or outside of a cell? The current options are pretty clunky. If there are not any native apps, does anyone know of things on windows that do the same that we could run in wine?

To make this clear, we're not looking for character recognition, we're looking for a program that will take character strokes and put them into a document along side one another on something like lined paper so that after writing in class one could conceivably print it out, three hole punch the page, and throw it in a notebook.

Any suggestions? Is this sort of thing still a long way off for all operating systems?