KevLinDev Blog

Ever since I saw the idea back in the 90’s, I’ve wanted one of those digital notepads where you write on paper with an ink pen while the device captures your scribblings to a file. However, that has always been in my “that’d be nice to have” category, so I’ve never managed to get around to purchasing one. So, this year Liz gave me ACECAD’s DigiMemo 692. (She claims that I’ve been whining about getting one of these things for years so she bought one to shut me up, but I have no idea what she’s talking about.)

The overall size of the device is close to 8.5″x11″ but that includes all of the electronics, ink cartridges, flash cards, and batteries. The actual pad and writing area is roughly 6″x8″. So, I got everything setup (very easy, btw) and in no time I was making silly drawings and transferring them to my laptop.

It turns out you have to install ACECAD’s software to read their file format. It only took a few minutes to realize from their editing tools in their app that the data was in some sort of vector format. I couldn’t find a file specification online, so I dropped ACECAD an email to see if they would share that with me. To my surprise, I had a response that evening with a Word document describing the format (it was Christmas, after all). Thanks ACECAD! I whipped out my trusty ActiveState Perl and hacked together a simple file converter. Within about 30 minutes, I had some of the worst handwriting and drawings you’ve ever seen in SVG, but they were mine…very exciting.

The image below is a snapshot of one of my tests. If you click the image, you’ll see the SVG on the left and a scan of the original page on the right.

My only complaint can be seen best with the three horizontal lines on the bottom of the page. The scan shows all three lines are at the same vertical position, but that is not true in the SVG file. It turns out that the angle of the pen affects the digitizer causing it to report slightly incorrect positions. I suppose this registration issue will lessen as my notepad gets thinner. I’ll certainly be experimenting with that shortly.

For those of you who are interested or just so happen to have one of these things, I’ve included a zip file of the original DigiMemo file, a scan of the same page, the Perl script and the resulting SVG file here.

Ahhh, this is exactly the kind of silly thing that needs to be done over the holidays. And, on top of that, I may actually have found a use for my code that simplifies hand-drawn curves.

Happy New Year to all of you!