Pen computing: digital ink and printed document

Pen computing is integral to the vision of natural user interface. This article presents research work on pen computing at Microsoft Research Asia in the areas of digital handwriting ink and digital printed document. Digital ink is a human-centric technology for a rich and natural human-computer interaction. It combines the expressive power of human handwriting with the power of a tablet PC. To make digital ink a first-class user experience, our researches are focusing on handwriting ink parsing, ink annotation and ink manipulation. With these technologies, unstructured handwriting noted is turned into structured and daily tasks such as note-taking and editing can be managed entirely in the ink domain, using a natural and friendly user interface. Our system can recognize the following handwriting structures: 1) automatic language script recognition; 2) layout (word, line and paragraph); 3) shape, diagram and table recognition. 3) Mathematics equation.