Ink Serialized Format (ISF) is a
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
format to store written ink information. The format is mainly used for mobile devices like
Personal digital assistant
A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in partic ...
s,
tablet PCs and
Ultra-Mobile PCs to store data entered with a
stylus
A stylus (plural styli or styluses) is a writing utensil or a small tool for some other form of marking or shaping, for example, in pottery. It can also be a computer accessory that is used to assist in navigating or providing more precision w ...
.
An ink object is simply a sequence of strokes, where each stroke is a sequence of points, and the points are X, and Y coordinates. Many of the new mobile devices can also provide information such as pressure, and angle. In addition, it can be used to store custom information along with the ink data.
Availability
Its specification is freely available fo
download Microsoft has added the ISF format to its technologies available under the
Open Specification Promise The Microsoft Open Specification Promise (or OSP) is a promise by Microsoft, published in September 2006, to not assert its patents, in certain conditions, against implementations of a certain list of specifications.
The OSP is not a licence, but r ...
making ISF related technology patent claims available for everybody to use or implement ISF.
This allows for ISF format to be used even together with
open source software licensing like
GPL2
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...
.
See also
*
InkML
InkML is an XML-based markup language to describe "ink" data input with an electronic pen or stylus. The recommended specification was published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in September 2011.
It is part of the W3C Multimodal Interac ...
External links
Integrating Ink on mobile devices– Ink article on
MSDN
Computer file formats
Microsoft Tablet PC
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