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Inky Goodness between InkSeine and OneNote

An exciting development today. We finally have copy/paste of ink strokes between InkSeine and OneNote doing something reasonable. So this is looking more likely to get into our initial release, provided we don't find any severe landmines with it during further testing!

This three-part capture shows the original content in InkSeine, the strokes appearing "selected" after doing a Paste in OneNote, and then the final look of the strokes in OneNote after tapping to clear the selection.

The fidelity of our stroke thickness conversion isn't perfect, but it's close enough that it shouldn't matter for most practical uses.  

The only catch right now is that if you select ink strokes and bitmaps or other stuff from InkSeine, we only paste the ink strokes into OneNote so that you can get at their inky goodness. However, it is a simple matter to grab a screen capture of your ink strokes mixed in with bitmaps if that is what you want instead.

My only remaining wish is that 'FeralBoy' will forgive me for appropriating his signature "inky goodness" catchphrase [:-)]

 

Update: Since my original post, we've discovered that on Windows XP, Microsoft.Ink.dll under the Common Language Runtime (CLR) 2.0 has a bug that prevents inky goodness from happening by default. Since InkSeine is 100% written in managed code, this issue affects us.

But there is good news! The issue is described in this knowledge base article and has a patch available. Copying and pasting ink between InkSeine and other applications will work as long as you install the update and reboot your Windows XP tablet.

I've also been able to verify that ink strokes can be copied and pasted between InkSeine and Windows Journal. However, Windows Journal highlighter strokes cannot yet be pasted into InkSeine correctly. Nevermind, we've fixed that too!

 


Posted 01-22-2008 7:59 PM by Ken Hinckley
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Comments

GottaBeMobile wrote Ink Compatibility Coming Between InkSeine and OneNote
on 01-23-2008 12:47 AM
scoobie wrote re: Inky Goodness between InkSeine and OneNote
on 01-23-2008 5:58 PM

I'm not clear how this helps me as a user. If I'm going to collect notes, I'll write them straight into Onenote. My suggestion is you need to integrate  inkseine with onenote. I dont see the benefit of writing straight into inksine because it means I have to move it out of inkseine to use it

Ken Hinckley wrote re: Inky Goodness between InkSeine and OneNote
on 01-23-2008 6:16 PM

Scoobie, I completely agree with you in principle. In practice, integrating InkSeine into OneNote would be a massive effort and probably much of our whimsical UI design would be a poor fit there. Also keep in mind that OneNote really does need to support mouse/keyboard usage as their primary interface model, since I'd venture to guess that 99% of all users employ it that way.

You can think of our trial release of InkSeine as a way to put our crazy interface ideas out in the wild and see which ones people like - and which ones people complain about. If there is good stuff there that people like, that would improve the case to consider integrating those features with future Microsoft products.

We added support for copy/paste between InkSeine and OneNote because a number of people have asked us for that capability, and it was pretty straightforward to add. This will make it easier to play around with InkSeine, or even use it as your go-to app for generating ink content if you like its user interface, but then import that ink into OneNote to take advantage of its great organizing, tagging, and archiving capabilities.

But if you are happy doing all your inking in OneNote, and don't find the InkSeine UI provides a good fit to the way you like to work with ink, then there would be little reason to use it.  

GottaBeMobile wrote InkSeine Isn't Perfect!
on 02-13-2008 10:43 AM
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