The advent of the computer has boomed to a point of prolific use in a variety of different areas. Computers are used throughout the world for everything from controlling speed and direction in a vehicle, to making an online order for a new product, to allowing a young child to learn how to count or read. Within the business industry, the use of the computer has greatly increased the efficiency for performing tasks.
Computer users are accustomed to using a mouse and keyboard as a way of interacting with a personal computer. Despite the advances in technology, most computer users tend to use documents printed on paper as their primary editing tool. Some advantages of printed paper include its readability and portability. Others include the ability to share annotated paper documents and the ease at which one can archive printed paper. In the case of annotations, the printed document assumes a greater significance because of the annotations placed on it by the user. One of the difficulties, however, with having a printed document with annotations is the later need to have the annotations entered back into the electronic form of the document. This requires the original user or another user to wade through the annotations and enter them into a personal computer. In some cases, a user will scan in the annotations and the original text, thereby creating a new document. These multiple steps make the interaction between the printed document and the electronic version of the document difficult to handle on a repeated basis. Further, scanned-in images are frequently non-modifiable. There may be no way to separate the annotations from the original text. This makes using the annotations difficult.
Computer technology has advanced in some areas in order to attempt to address these problems. With the advent of the tablet style personal computer, a computer user can input handwritten strokes onto the display regions of the monitor. As such, annotations may be entered directly into a document. However, many problems exist with respect to tracking the movement of an input device for the handwritten annotations.
One technique of capturing handwritten information is by using a pen whose location may be determined during writing. One type of pen functions by using a camera to capture an image of paper encoded with a predefined pattern. This pattern is used by the pen to determine a location of a pen on a piece of paper. However, the pattern is encoded onto a paper document. A user must still maintain a paper document for use with the pen to be uploaded to a personal computer.