Google's repacking this week of Writely and Google Spreadsheets into "Docs and Spreadsheets" got me thinking again about ink in the browser. Shouldn't I be able to ink in a Google Doc? Minimally I'd like to be able to add handdrawn sketches to a document, but I'd also like to be able to use editing gestures like those in InkGestures Add-in for Word to easily be able to edit long documents with a Tablet PC and a pen. There are other uses of ink in the browser, but for editing and creating documents this would cover most cases for me.
So I pulled out the browser code again and started thinking extra hard about how to integrate ink into the editing experience in a browser. This time around I decided to focus on editing within an iframe, such as often is used within Internet Explorer.
My first goal was to get drawings into the editor. Of course, there's no support for ink today. There is support for images, though, and as such the trick is to post ink-embedded images into the document--much as you would a normal image. A special editing mode is going to be needed for creating and modifying the ink drawings. There's also going to be the issue of where to host the inked images. I don't have a prototype of a complete solution working yet, but it all seems manageable. To integrate into Google Docs or Hotmail or a blog content management system is another issue. One step at a time.
In the meantime, I decided to explorer the ink editing for a bit. My first test was to port over a small number of editing gestures from InkGestures itself. This included the bold, underline and italics gestures. An ink overlay is placed over the browser to collect the strokes as before which collects the ink, interprets the strokes, and passes the appropriate "commands" down to the editor below. So far the simple tests have worked out OK. I've attached a screenshot shown below. You can see the italics gesture being applied.

I want to go back now and get the ink drawing working. This feature won't be as good as that in Word, because ink won't be able to overlap other pictures or text, however, it'll be better than nothing. I'll post more when I get it working.


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