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Ink Services Concepts

Ink input is available for any application that accepts text input, as long as an Ink input device is connected to the computer and the user turns on handwriting recognition in the Ink pane of System Preferences. An application doesn’t need to perform any tasks to support Ink input. However, there may be special situations for which an application needs to use the Ink Services application programming interface (API) to provide a customized Ink-input solution. After reading this chapter, you should be able to determine whether your application needs to use the Ink Services API.

Ink has four components (shown in “Figure 2-1”)—Ink input method, framework, server, and user preferences. The Ink input method is the component responsible for collecting Ink, drawing Ink, managing phrase termination, and posting Ink events. The Ink framework provides the application programming interface and services for the other Ink components. The Ink server manages the recognizer (including character and word segmentation), the language model used for recognition, and the Ink window that can be used for Ink input. The user preferences component manages the user settings that control the Ink recognition mode as well as a variety of options that can be set by the user.

The remainder of this chapter provides an overview of the Ink user interface, describes how Ink technology works in Mac OS X, and discusses the concepts you need to understand the Ink Services API.

Contents:

Ink User Interface
How Ink Works in Mac OS X

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