Distressed books from forgotten decades, documents battered by time, and postcards from the distant past hold a deep charm for me. Perhaps it was because my grandfather was an insatiable reader and his shelves were always brimming with volumes dating as far back as the 19^th century. Maybe it was because my great-uncle was an avid stamp collector and gave me heaps of aged stamps and letters when I was a young boy.

Whatever the reason, Wal-Mart can keep their shiny rows of bestsellers. I'll settle into my armchair with a yellowed tome, during the darkest recesses of the night, to read eldritch tales of mystery and imagination.

The same is true, I believe, for writing and sketching. Just look at all the amazing and beautiful personal touches that artists and writers add to their moleskine notebooks.

So I decided to join in the fun with InkSeine on my Tablet PC. I scanned in a few books, papers, and found objects to personalize my inky reflections.

Below are few examples that I came up with. So that you can have fun too, I've made most of these backgrounds available as download of blank example InkSeine notes (ZIP archive, 10MB) from the InkSeine webpage. More details on how to use the samples later in this post.

Inking after Midnight

These custom pages come from a book printed in the 1930's that belonged to my grandfather. This makes the perfect foil for my creativity.

In a dream-vision I transcribe the legendary Codex Inkseinus, a grimoire of arcane and forbidden Tablet PC knowledge, originally penned by the mysterious Mad Inker of Redmond:

Next, I scan in some blank pages. The anachronism of yellowing paper on my venerated NEC VY11F/GL-R slate sets the proper tone:

Of course, I begin my narrative with a distressed "letter" from the unfortunate author to add a ring of authenticity - with due homage to H.P. Lovecraft, who often employed the epistolary literary device with great success.

Want to see the rest of the Codex? Well, I should not to reveal too much of this cryptic treatise at once. You'll just have to keep following this blog. The AlpineInker often gets ideas for posts by paying visits to the sole known surviving copy of the Codex, which resides under lock and key at Miskatonic University.

Inking with a Splash

For my next project I wanted a lighter mood, so I scanned in one of my watercolor boards. I grew up close to the ocean. This backsplash makes we want to pen an epic tale of men and the sea:

Rough Drafts & A Library for my Notes

I mentioned my envy of Ript the other day. With very little work I produced a similar effect by scanning in a ratty piece of paper. I sized it to make a nice title area for my note. I rotated it by 90 degrees to make rough edges for my artwork.

I played with this a little more to produce a front page for my library. All I need to do is add InkSeine hyperlinks to my "note books" and I'm good to go. As you can see I'm having great fun with the mostly-working-but-not-bug-free rotation feature we've been working to add to InkSeine.

Hello from UMPC Land

My UMPC screen is about the size of a postcard, so I might as well use it to write one:

Download Example InkSeine Custom Backgrounds

I've produced four sample InkSeine notes with blank custom pages. The download is a WinZip archive (.ZIP, 10MB) that contains:

• book-2up-stationery.iks: A two-up note format for Landscape orienation on your tablet, based on the old book style shown above.
• book-stationery.iks: Single-page old book stationery formatted for Portrait orientation.
• postcard-umpc.iks: Landscape UMPC format using the postcard.
• splash-stationery.iks: A sample Portrait orientation note based on the watercolor backsplash.

Before you go too crazy with these, be aware that InkSeine has no explicit support for custom page backgrounds. As a result it is kind of hacky at the moment and resulting notes can become bloated, but you can still have quite a bit of fun with these samples. If there's enough interest and we can figure out a good way to make it work "for real", we'll look to better support custom InkSeine page styles in the future.

I've set up the pages so that lasso-selecting your ink will never select the background bitmap by accident, but if you tap-select you may hit the background and move it around accidentally. Just hit Undo if that happens. In the currently available release of InkSeine, there is no way to "lock down" a bitmap in the background.

To make new pages that still have the fancy background, use Copy Page from the page menu, then use Paste from that menu to insert your page with the custom background. It's best to copy and paste some blank pages before you add any ink. That way you can make more pages without having to select and cut the ink from each page as you go.

Here's How to Make Your Own Custom Backgrounds

With a bit of hackery, you can make your own backgrounds, even though InkSeine currently has no "custom page" features.

Once you have a suitable scan, here's what you can do. If you don't have a good book or a suitable scanner, I recommend appropriating one of the aforementioned moleskine photos from Flickr, or see if any of the Wikipedia codex scans strike your fancy.

• Make sure you save your scan in a resolution and format where the resulting file is 50-100 KB at the most. I scaled mine down using Microsoft Paint to about 50% of their original size, and saved the scaled-down versions as JPG files to get them as small as possible. You'll lose some quality this way, but if you use huge bitmaps on all your InkSeine pages, you'll quickly bog down InkSeine and overwhelm the memory of your poor tablet. I also used Alias Sketchbook's airbrush to touch up some of the scans to suit my needs.
• Double the height of your bitmap (plus about 25-50 pixels to spare) and flood-fill it with black or whatever background color works best. This will allow you to import the bitmap into InkSeine and expand it so that the scan fills the screen, but the center of the bitmap will be off-screen. Since InkSeine selects a bitmap only when the center of the bitmap falls within your selection lassos, this will allow you to ink and lasso-select any of your writing on the page without selecting the bitmap too. You'll definitely want to set up your custom pages that way or it quickly becomes annoying to work with them.
• Drag this doubled-height bitmap from your file folder onto your InkSeine page. Drag it so that the upper-left corner of the bitmap lies at the upper-left corner of your page. Then take the bottom-right corner of the selection and drag straight to the right. This expands the page as much as possible. This is what this step looked like when I started with my book scan:

• Depending on the aspect ratio of your scan, you may want to further scale your bitmap just vertically, or just horizontally, to fill the screen. With my book, I stretched it a bit horizontally to make it fit the screen completely. It looked fine since the stretch was not extreme. You'll probably have to pan your bitmap around until you can see the desired selection resizing handle on-screen. Resize it as needed and then pan it back to align to the top-left corner.
• Voila, you are done! You have a bitmap that fills the page completely, but which will not be accidentally selected while you are lasso-selecting ink on the page.

Have Fun and Report Back!

Give the samples download or your own scans a try. Do you want the option to use custom pages for your notes? What kinds of custom stuff do you find you want to do? What kind of features or capabilities would you want around custom pages if we were to add them to InkSeine?