TAbiWord / News: Recent posts

Visit http://www.cs.umd.edu/~kmconroy for a demonstration of the TabiWord system.

This marks the completion of the inital goals of the project. We are in the planning stages for the next milestone which will probably aim to integrate Tabiword with a paper augmented digital document (PADD) system as described by my advisor, Franois Guimbretire.

See http://www.cs.umd.edu/~francois/Papers/UIST03.pdf
and http://www.cs.umd.edu/~francois/ for more information on this exciting system.... read more

The alpha version of TAbiWord is almost ready for release!

I have finished the bulk of the coding and will be spending the next few weeks making a demonstration video of the system as well as writing my thesis about the project.

I will also be contacting the fine developers at AbiWord to help me work out a few minor PieceTable assertion failures/problems that I'm having, but hopefully these will only result in minor changes which will make the system more fault tolerant. I also hope that they will be able to help me get a working installation build for the Win32/Tablet platform which I can then post.... read more

Although we still have some bugs to work out, we have nearly finished moving over to a "little ink model" and now support multiple ink strokes with nearly full support for zooming and reflow. Over the next several weeks, a few minor bugs will be patched and several minor additional features will be implemented. A working prototype should be released within a month.

Screen shots:
Several strokes: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kmconroy/images/tabiword/normal.gif
Zoomed in on several strokes: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kmconroy/images/tabiword/zoomed.gif
Zoomed in and reflowed several strokes: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kmconroy/images/tabiword/zoomedReflow.gif

We have a *very rough* working version of ink reflow working. This means that you can annoate some text in the document and then as you move the text around the screen, the ink will move with the text!

We still need to debug zooming, fix up the scroll support, correct some of the reflow calculations (right now we use an apporoximate location - we need to make it precise), breaking ink into several ink runs so that it matches the characters, move to a little ink model rather than a big ink model (which will help the UI significantly), and fix the bugs with the InkRun/PieceTable and the graphics/refresh problems.... read more

The fine folks over at Microsoft, Inc. have provided us with a TabletPC that we will be using for user studies and general testing. It's a very nice NEC VERSA LitePad. It's light, it's easy to use, and it has the latest build of TAbiWord on it. Much thanks to people at Microsoft.

TAbiWord is an extension of the AbiWord (www.abisource.org) word processor. We are adding support for the Tablet PC so that users can quickly and easily annotate their documents, make changes, and have the annotations reflow automatically. This is the idea of "Moving Markup" first suggested by Gene Golovchinsky and Laurent Denoue (see http://www.fxpal.com/publications/PR/PR-02-183/FXPAL-PR-02-183.pdf\)