Recently I have been experimenting with an Apcom e-pen for e-marking. These pens cost approximately £50 so, if you already have a Laptop or PC which you can plug the e-pen into, they are a much cheaper option than buying a Tablet, iPad etc.
The first thing to say about the pen is that it feels and writes just like a normal ink pen. It has 2 types of nib, an ink one and a stylus. It is very quick and easy to switch between these. The ink one enables you to write on normal paper, and record notes which can then be uploaded to your PC. However I have been trying out the stylus plugged in as an input device to my laptop. The video below gives a flavour of how such an e-pen can be used. (This video is of IRIS notes. )
My laptop is a few years old! It is running Windows Vista and has Word 2003. For handwriting onto a Word document which is then automatically turned into text, it works well with the Tablet PC input panel in Word. For handwritten comments or drawings which you prefer to keep in their original format you can use the pen with the Ink Annotations and Ink comment functions in Word. These annotations can then be saved and provided as feedback.
Some of our markers work with PDF files so I have also tried the e-pen with PDF XChange viewer. Again it works really well as an input device using the built-in comment and markup tools.
The next challenge is to see whether it is possible to annotate a normal printed document using the ink function of the e-pen whilst a digital copy is simultaneously made. The main problem I have found with this at the moment is orientating the e-pen receiver so that the point where you are writing on the paper copy matches the same point on screen.
Filed under: e-marking Tagged: | digital pens, e-marking, e-pens
