[Edited from related support email]
We are trying to get Direct RT to measure the reaction time from the presentation of the stimulus until the participant BEGINS typing. Right now, it seems to be recording reaction time from the presentation of the stimulus until they finish typing their response and press "enter".
Again, no way to do this yet--not in v2008 anyways. Only work around would be to have a prior stimulus like "press spacebar to start typing your answer" which would then be followed on the same trial by the rt:text response. In the log version of the data file you could then pull out the RT for the spacebar--but this is not exactly the same as the RT for the first character in the text box. I just mention it in case it could help until we come up with a better solution.