Pen Computing is integral to the vision of natural user interface. This talk presents research work on pen computing at Microsoft Research Asia in the areas of digital handwriting ink and digital printed document. Working in harmony with existing computers, digital ink and printed document combines the naturalness, convenience and mobility of the "analog" pen with the power of the digital world to bring computing to all the places where people are still doing things in non-digital ways. At MSR Asia, we have been researching and developing core technology, and architecting the system to make this happen. Digital ink is a human-centric technology for a rich and natural human-computer interaction. It combines the expressive power of human handwriting with the power of a tablet PC. To make digital ink a first-class user experience, our researches are focusing on handwriting ink parsing, ink annotation and ink manipulation. With these technologies, unstructured handwriting noted are turned into structured and daily tasks such as note-taking and editing can be managed entirely in the ink domain, using a natural and friendly user interface. Our system can recognize the following handwriting structures: 1) Automatic language script recognition; 2) Layout (word, line and paragraph); 3) Shape, diagram and table recognition. 3) Mathematics equation. Some of these technologies have been incorporated into Microsoft products, including Tablet PC and OneNote. Digital documents are often printed out for reading, editing and sharing. When people print, they lose all the advantages of their digital documents -they become not just dead tree, but dead bits. Users' wiring and annotation on printed documents are no longer tracked by the PC software and synced with original digital documents. To keep track of who changed what and when automatically, our researches are focusing on encoding and decoding technologies to make printed document digital. We have developed a software system and a hardware pen prototype so that users are allowed to write and annotate on the MS Office printed documents with a digital pen. Inking, annotating, reading smart tags and searching are just some of the functionalities our technologies can bring to printed documents. All handwriting information on the printed documents are captured digitally just like on tablet PC and synchronized with the original digital documents on PCs.These technologies give users the freedom in writing, diagramming, sketching, and capturing creative ideas on both tablet PC and printed documents using a digital pen.

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