bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1998-1999) — Winter 1998/99 // Hiver 1998/99, pp. 3–4
Crosspad Personal Digital Notepad
A. I. Cross Company (www.cross-pcg.com)
(Includes digitizer notepad, IBM Ink
Manager software, and electronic stylus)
US$399
System Requirements: Windows 95, 98 or
NT 4.0); Pentium or better processor; 20 MB
hard disk space; 16 MB RAM minimum
(32 MB recommended); one 9-pin COM
port; CD-ROM drive
This profession of ours has existed in one form or another since Biblical times, and we who practice it have spent much of that time taking notes. Wax-covered wooden plaques, clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, 20-pound bond – the materials have changed, but not the function.
When I walked through the big bronze doors nearly a quarter-century ago to join what was then called the Department of External Affairs, the diplomat’s tools of choice were what they had always been: pen and notepad. Poole’s royal blue fountain pen ink was still supplied on request, although disposable plastic ballpoints had pretty well become standard.
What has happened since then in the field of information technology has had remarkably little effect on the traditional diplomatic function of note-taking. It has not enabled diplomats to discharge their core tasks more efficiently and effectively, so much as it has enabled them to take on additional tasks formerly done by others: secretaries, clerks, communicators, couriers.
As an FS-ID I was looked upon askance for requesting an electric typewriter to use for drafting.
About the time of my first posting, to Canada’s NATO delegation in Brussels, the first word processing systems made their appearance.
A couple of years later in Ottawa, I once suggested to someone who is now a very senior official that what the Department needed was a computer system which would hold all our message traffic in a database, accessible to users with connected terminals. He no longer remembers telling me: “Tu rêves en technicouleur!” (Well, it was only 1979.)
The Apple made its appearance, then the IBM PC. Then came the clones.
COSICS came. As mainframe systems with dumb terminals go, it was a good system. And, as good systems go, it went.
SIGNET replaced COSICS and, in its various alphabetical incarnations and upgrades, it seems lately to stay a while.
But note-taking has stayed the same, apparently impervious to the electronic age.
More recent innovations, however, promise to change all that.
The first signs of something radically new were pocket digital assistants (PDAs), or palmtops: miniature computers with scheduling, contact list, to-do list and sometimes other applications built in. They had miniature keyboards and were about the size and shape of a pocket diary — the paper artifact they were intended to replace. They weighed more, but could he carried in your pocket — although it would help if your jacket had a steel inter-lining.
Then came PDAs without keyboards. You used a stylus instead. Best known are the Pilot — Palm Pilot — Palm III series. They recognize your handwriting — as long as you write in their proprietary style. More significantly, they synchronize with the Personal Information Manager software on your computer. The information you record on your PDA uploads to the PC; information input to the PC by yourself or a colleague (or your secretary, where such still exist) downloads to the PDA.
Within the last year or so, voice recognition software has appeared that holds out the prospect of being able to give dictation to a PC. (as Orwell’s Winston Smith did to Big Brother’s “Speakwrite” ’, to cite a non- PC. example). But, when we return to the office with a pad full of notes and a requirement to transmit a report for delivery by 0900, we find that SIGNET is incapable of typing those notes up.
The most frustrating thing about the new technology is that until now it has stayed on the desktop, bound to the network by coaxial or fibre-optic cables, or in any case too heavy to put in your pocket and take to a meeting. PDAs are not very good for the task that most us still spend much of our time doing: taking notes. There is also an evolving etiquette that militates not only against burbling beepers and shrilling cell-phones, but clicking keyboards. Where the core diplomatic activity of note-taking is concerned, we are still where we were a century or a millennium ago: with pen and notepad.
Until now.
Somewhat masked by the availability of voice recognition software has been a development of at least equal significance: handwriting recognition software.
How does it work? According to the IBM Handwriting Recognition Research Group (www.research ibm com/handwriting): “The main technique used in our unconstrained handwriting recognition engine is that of hidden Markov models. A model is built for each character that we want to recognize — typically all the keyboard symbols, though this varies from language to language. A model is trained by collecting statistics from a large number of examples of such letters contained in our handwriting database. This has been created by collecting samples of handwriting from a large number of people with a wide range of handwriting styles.
Having created the models with these statistics, we recognize new words by comparing them with models for whole words, created by concatenating individual letter models.”
Of course. Just so.
This is what is at the core of the latest development: the personal digital notepad, or PDN. Enter the latest offering from A. T. Cross, better known as a maker of exquisite and expensive pens, and more recently of styli for PDAs. The Crosspad went on sale in the USA at the end of March 1998, and is now available at some locations in Canada.
The Crosspad (available in two different sizes) looks much like that most mundane of stationery items, a clipboard holding either an 8 1/2” × 11” or 9” × 6” lined pad. You write on it with a ballpoint pen, just like you always have.
But the clipboard and the pen are more than they seem. The clipboard (the larger model is 24.5 cm x 35 cm and 1.5 cm thick) weighs no less than a kilo. It contains a full-page digitizer tablette, and 1 MB of flash RAM, sufficient to store about fifty pages of handwriting. Below the bottom edge of the paper pad are control buttons and a small display panel. Recessed into the top edge are a serial port (for data transfer), an AC recharger port for an optional rechargeable battery system, and the housing for four AAA batteries.
The stylus looks like, and is, a handsome (and hefty — at 40 grams it weighs as much as a Montblanc 149) Cross ballpoint in matte black with gold trim. A crystal-like bout de papier Vol.
“signet” in the top of the cap is said to contain a holographic insignia designating the pen as “digital” (but try as I might, I could not discern a holographic image of any kind). The interior of the pen is occupied principally by a tiny radio transmitter, and a AAAA battery to power it. This leaves room for a special, and very short (4.5 cm) ballpoint refill sufficient for about fifty pages of writing. (A recess in the edge of the clipboard accommodates a cassette with five spare refills.)
The cardboard backing of a standard paper pad slides easily into a slot near the top of the Crosspad, which holds it steady in relation to the digitizer. You write on the paper in a normal manner, but touching the pen to the paper (a spring-loaded switch can be felt working) activates the radio transmitter. As you write with ink on the paper you record a digital image (“digital ink”, as the documentation refers to it) of the page into RAM, where it is stored to be uploaded into a P.C. running IBM’s “Ink Manager” software (now in Release 1.5).
The software is really the heart of the system. It installs from a CD-ROM in much the same manner as any other Windows 95 application, with a “Wizard” prompting for information (Do you print, use cursive script, or write in all capitals?) at appropriate points.
It takes about two hours, however, to set the software up fully, so that it can recognize your individual handwriting. This is accomplished by working through an “orientation guide” which is printed on a paper pad and inserted into the Crosspad. As in grade school handwriting exercises, you copy out two dozen pages of pre-set phrases and sentences (including “the quick brown fox..”), which are then uploaded to the P.C. by means of the “Ink Transfer” utility, and processed by the “Ink Manager Trainer” module. (It took my Pentium 133 about 40 minutes to process each set.) Two “basic training” sets are included in the printed orientation guide; a further seven are included in the software as Adobe Acrobat
* PDF files which can be printed out and used to improve the system’s sensitivity to your personal handwriting. Once the basic “training” process is completed, Ink Manager is supposed to be capable of recognizing your handwriting and converting it into computer text, which can he inserted into a word possessor to become a memo, an e-mail, a stilted note verbale, or what you will. Electronic tablettes have been around for some time, but they have been permanently tethered to their host computers. Tiny radio transmitters are not new either, as anyone knows who has attended a technical security briefing. But a computer program that can be trained in a couple of hours to transcribe notes taken down in haste — we have been waiting for this for some little time.
I found that the system performed more or less as advertised. Once uploaded to the computer, hand-written notes appear as a graphic image in a window on the screen. When the “recognition” utility is activated. a transcription of the notes appears in print in a second window; indecipherable words are flagged with an inverted question mark. Once I had completed the “training” process, Ink Manager was able to recognize and convert the first draft of this article with what I would estimate to be an error rate of less than one character in ten. The error rate increased markedly, however, on the phrase “tu rêves en Technicouleur”, which confirmed that Ink Manager works by recognizing not only characters, but words. It failed on all the accented characters, and attempted to convert French words to English ones of the same approximate spelling.
Much like the spell-checker in a word processing application, Ink Manager works with a dictionary of about 30,000 words. In the USA version, this is an English-only dictionary. As in a word processor, there is a utility for adding words, but a French dictionary is obviously essential for Canada.
Once in the system, your notes can be stored in “notebook” files, either as converted text or as graphic images (useful if you want to keep your doodles), indexed according to keywords or dates. They can be copied into word processing or graphics applications and transmitted by P.C. fax or as e-mail attachments.
Until now, the contribution of information technology has been to place on our desktops the capability of performing tasks that were traditionally carried out by others. The PDN provides long-awaited electronic enhancement to the traditional diplomatic task of note-taking — the job that we have always had to do ourselves.
I suspect that this latest innovation will catch on rapidly. Personally, I can no longer imagine doing serious note-taking without a PDN, but I will have one regret. I will miss the crisp, sensuous feeling of a gold nib gliding over good paper with just the right amount of resistance. Ballpoints give me writers’ cramp.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1998-1999) — Winter 1998/99 // Hiver 1998/99, pp. 3–4. Read the rest of this issue →
