Serial storage of ink and its properties

• US 20050147300A1
• Filed: 12/23/2004
• Published: 07/07/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 06/21/2000
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Dresevic, Bodin, Bhattacharyay, Subha, Balaz, Rudolph, Karlov, Donald D., Haluptzok, Patrick Michael
• Granted Patent: US 7,321,689 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 382/186
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/103 Formatting, i.e. changing of presentation of documents automatic justification G06F40/189; automatic line break hyphenation G06F40/191
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/169 Annotation, e.g. comment data or footnotes

Abstract

Ink is stored in a data structure that permits later retrieval by applications. The ink includes stroke information and property information. Properties may be associated globally with the ink strokes and/or with each stroke individually. Aspects include a data structure that supports ink for multiple applications. Using the storage system, method, and data structure, various applications may expand on ink to include additional attributes while permitting the ink to be used in applications not supporting the additional attributes. When encountering an unknown tag, the applications will skip past the end of the tag and its associated data to start reading the next tag.

Claims

1. A method for using a data structure for storing ink comprising the steps of:

identifying a tag in the data structure;

retrieving a size or count of data associated with the tag; and

,

if an application can use tag, then reading the data associated with the tag, otherwise skipping the tag by skipping past the data based on the size or count of the data.