editor's blog
Subscribe Now

Marking Up Your Two Cents

We have already looked at some of the touch technology presented at last month’s Interactive Technology Summit. But the same touch and stylus overview presented by Ricoh’s John Barrus addressed another issue: markup.

Much of the touch technology is targeted at large format screens, including interactive whiteboards. But the key to many such devices is interactivity: multiple people in multiple places contributing to the content of the board. Doing that apparently isn’t easy using existing products: he noted that some require 40 hours of training to learn how to use. I frankly don’t know of any company that would agree to losing its team for a week so they can learn to use a whiteboard.

But such collaboration goes far beyond whiteboards. What about document review? In the old days, you printed out an original, made lots of copies that you gave to reviewers, and got back inked-up versions that you integrated. (Full disclosure… I had something of a deserved reputation for exploding red-pen syndrome when I did reviews in my “youth”… But I occasionally got as good as I gave; this scenario is dated, but feels very real.)

Now it’s more typical to use features like the editing and commenting capabilities in Microsoft Word and Adobe’s PDF readers. Those work, but if we had styluses that worked well enough to capture handwriting (which is coming), then it would frankly be easier simply to do old-school written markup electronically.

Whether real-time whiteboard collaboration or piecemeal markup, this activity may take place locally or involve the cloud, so if you took a few minutes, you could probably imagine a variety of situations where such capabilities might be useful.

The problem is, according to Dr. Barrus, there is no universal infrastructure to support this, nor are there standards that everyone agrees on. His suggestion was that we need some. The standard would have to support text and images, of course, but also strokes – including specification of width, color, transparency, end-cap (square vs. round vs. something else), and the like. There are at present four major markup languages (no, HTML doesn’t count, despite its name).

  • PDF currently can handle text and images; stroke information would have to be added.
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) has some stroke information, but needs such additional things as stroke timing. It also needs to support multi-page documents. It’s XML-based, so it’s easily extended.
  • Microsoft has an Ink Serialized Format (ISF), but it doesn’t support text or images.
  • InkML is stoke-oriented and has features well suited to handwriting recognition, but it also doesn’t support text or images.

This was largely a call to the industry for action to define the necessary standards. While formal activity has yet to commence, you can contact markupinfo@johnbarrus.org if you’re interested in helping out.

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Jun 9, 2023
In this Knowledge Booster blog, let us talk about the simulation of the circuits based on switched capacitors and capacitance-to-voltage (C2V) converters using various analyses available under the Shooting Newton method using Spectre RF. The videos described in this blog are ...
Jun 8, 2023
Learn how our EDA tools accelerate 5G SoC design for customer Viettel, who designs chips for 5G base stations and drives 5G rollout across Vietnam. The post Customer Spotlight: Viettel Accelerates Design of Its First 5G SoC with Synopsys ASIP Designer appeared first on New H...
Jun 2, 2023
I just heard something that really gave me pause for thought -- the fact that everyone experiences two forms of death (given a choice, I'd rather not experience even one)....

featured video

Synopsys Solution for RTL to Signoff Power Analysis

Sponsored by Synopsys

Synopsys’ industry-leading power analysis solution built on PrimePower technology that enables early RTL exploration, low power implementation and power signoff for design of energy-efficient SoCs.

Learn more about Synopsys’ Energy-Efficient SoCs Solutions

featured paper

EC Solver Tech Brief

Sponsored by Cadence Design Systems

The Cadence® Celsius™ EC Solver supports electronics system designers in managing the most challenging thermal/electronic cooling problems quickly and accurately. By utilizing a powerful computational engine and meshing technology, designers can model and analyze the fluid flow and heat transfer of even the most complex electronic system and ensure the electronic cooling system is reliable.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

EV Charging: Understanding the Basics
Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Bel
Have you ever considered what the widespread adoption of electric vehicles will look like? What infrastructure requirements will need to be met? In this episode of Chalk Talk, I chat about all of this and more with Bruce Rose from Bel. We review the basics of EV charging, investigate the charging requirements for both AC and DC chargers, and examine the role that on-board inverters play in electric vehicle charging.
Mar 27, 2023
10,141 views