Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Design Toolkit requires manually executing several commands within Adobe Acro-
bat. Manually generating these documents is not problematic if an application uses
a limited number of paper documents that are identical for each user. However if
users need personalized documents, possibly even creating and printing them dur-
ing runtime, the manual approach is inadequate. For such cases, Anoto offers the
Paper SDK. This SDK enables applications to add the Anoto pattern to documents
during runtime.
For developing applications, Anoto offers an SDK for PC applications (includ-
ing Java and for native Windows applications) and an SDK for network applications.
Both SDKs support only non-streaming applications, offering classes and methods
for accessing and parsing pen data that has been transferred via batch synchroniza-
tion. The SDKs allow the developer to directly retrieve pen traces that were made
on a specific interactive region. Furthermore, the SDKs offer basic additional func-
tionality, such as for rendering and for saving pen data.
Access to the streaming functionality of the ADP-301 is supported by a further
SDK, the Streaming Pen Connectivity Driver and its accompanying API. This pro-
vides basic methods for accessing the pen data arriving through the Bluetooth con-
nection. While it gives access to the linear data stream, to the best of our knowledge
it does not provide the abstractions offered by the non-streaming SDKs described
above.
PaperToolkit
The PaperToolkit [178] is an open source toolkit developed by Ron Yeh at Stanford
University. It builds on top of the Anoto SDK. PaperToolkit aims at an interactive
use of digital pens in applications and provides more support and higher-level ab-
stractions of digital pen data than the Anoto SDK. It is based on an event-based
architecture, similar to frameworks for Graphical User Interfaces toolkits like Java
Swing or Windows Forms. The application developer can compose a paper inter-
face by composing predefined interface widgets, such as drawing areas, buttons and
check boxes. The toolkit renders these widgets on top of the Anoto pattern to a PDF
document and allows for printing it on paper.
For applications the framework provides event handlers that react to specific
types of pen input. Event handlers can be added to paper interface widgets and trig-
ger events on the software side. For instance, the application can register event han-
dlers that are invoked when any pen activity has occurred within a specific widget,
when a button widget has been tapped on or when a check box has been selected.
PaperToolkit unifies real-time and batched event handling. It is also possible to
use several pens simultaneously in the same application. The toolkit contains plenty
of further components that ease developing interactive Pen-and-Paper Applications.
This includes a component that allows developers to define a fully functional paper
interface simply by sketching it on paper, diverse components for rendering digital
pen data as well as a tool for simulating pen data for debugging purposes.
