A Marking Based Interface for Collaborative Writing

AbstractWe describe a system to support a particular model of document creation. In this model, the document flows from the primary author to one or more collaborators. They annotate it, then return it to the author who makes the final changes. Annotations are made using conventional marks, typically using a stylus. The intent is to match the flow and mark-up of paper documents observed in the everyday world, . The system is very much modeled on Wang FreeStyle (Perkins, Blatt, Workman and Ehrlich, 1989; Francik and Akagi, 1989; u0026 Levine and Ehrlich, in press). Our contribution is to incorporate mark recognition into the system and to explore some novel navigation tools that are enabled by the higher-level data structures that we use. The system is described and the results of initial usertesting are reported.