Digital Ink question..

[Tabletguy]

I have a customer that is looking to be able to use the Tablets with their proprietary Sales suite ( was written by the Owner of the Company). They would need the ability to be able to hand write directly into the entry bodies kind of like you can with the Tablet Enhancements for Outlook, and have the ink changed to text. Is there anything available that they could add to the current software that would allow them to do this? Oh, yeah the reason for this is they dont feel that the TIP is sufficient.

Thanks in advance for help!

Joe M

[lsbeller]

Just to be sure, have they tried the Write Anywhere feature? IMO, even Office 2000 has a usable ink interface with WA.

[rbushway]

You might also take a look at the Lonestart Alpha. Microsoft is accepting alpha testers, especially if you are a developer.

The new floating TIP is fantastic. It adjusts to the text box that your cursor is in.

check out the alpha thread in this forum.

[mikewo]

For custom handling of this (and if you can't get a peek at Lonestar) they can always look at coding this themselves via the Tablet SDK from microsoft. The SDK contains ink controls that can be manipulated and placed on existing forms. You can also tailor how the ink controls interpret the ink, for example, to tailor a specific control to only look for numbers in the ink, etc.

[ArinG]

Joe,

As Mike mentions, this can be done (fairly easily) by modifying the application to accept ink inkput either by using one of the custom controls in the SDK or by modifying the controls that are currently being used in the application.

If your customer has any questions about how to do this. Don't be shy about posting your questions here or on our public newsgroup (microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc.developer).

Thanks

[Tabletguy]

Thanks guys! Yeah, I'm more of the Sale's and Technical application guy. Not too much of a developer. My only Programming back ground is with Industrial Robots :-).

The customer that I'm working with is actually my former employer (Gee Go figure) Anyways, the President of the company is very software Savvy, and I'm sure could do what ever he needs, I just wanted to find out from all of you how easy something like this might be, and where to look for some thing like this so that I could offer that info to the end user.

Again Thank you all!

Joe M