Why can't my Tablet write small?
When comparing pen & paper, with the Tablet PC, you will quickly realize they are not the same.
There's issues such as tactile feel, the distance between your stylus and the ink dot (the cursor) on inking surfaces, and other such differences observable at first site. But the difference that sticks out to me personally is that for some reason I end up writing bigger on a Tablet PC as compared to pen & paper. There are many factors feeding into this, of these being the fact that writing on plastic or glass just does not have the same tactile feel as writing on paper, but this blog is a tad of explanation on other factors that feed into this, notably NOISE.
The Tablet PC has the following characteristcs:
- It is an electronic device which has many sub components such as the LCD backlight, hard drive, as well as some having optical drives
- It has an electro magnetic digitizer built into them today, which creates an EM field on the surface of the LCD
- The electro magnetic digitizer in general has really really high resolution, far more higher than the LCD display capabilities (DPI)
- The electro magnetic digitizer in general has really high sampling rates, far more than a mouse
- The software subsystem from the digitizer driver up is structured in such a way as to not be bogged down by the latency that exists in the Windows message pump and application threads blocking
Now all the above is good and dandy, but then why do I end up writing big?
The factors that feed into this phenomenon as far as my understanding goes are the first 2 bullets. Essentially there is circuity noise on any Tablet PC no matter how hard we try to mitigate these thru great engineering of our OEMs. As an end result you have jittery input where even when the pen is held still, the cursor keeps shaking - although there is a range in this problem where it is human perceivable and where not.
As a result, filters are applied to smooth out the input from the digitizer, potentially at the EM digitizer firmware level as well as at the Tablet PC input software level. This happens to remove small features in your handwriting to the point that you can't write really small.
This is just one of the many problems we continue to challenge going forward in order to bring the true intuitiveness of pen & paper to computers. Stay tuned for our future releases where we will continue to improve.
Koji Kato - Platform Lead Program Manager - Tablet PC
