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Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Wood Carving & OneNote

Way back in 2003-2004 I fell in love with Microsoft OneNote. The first version, OneNote 2003, was a little tricky to use when using handwriting. There were lots of questions about it in the newsgroups. After many hours of trial and error, spread out over several weeks, I finally figured out how use the handwriting feature in a manner that would produce consistent results. Being the helpful newsgroup maven that I was, I sat down to write up an explanation for all of this. When I was finished, I realized that I had enough for a magazine article. I hunted around for a magazine that would publish my article and found one which would take it for no pay, but at least I would then be a "published author." All they asked is that I add some photographs to illustrate my techniques. So, I sat down and took a bunch of screen shots, took a picture of my hand holding a stylus, and used PhotoShop to put them together to make it look as if I had taken a perfect picture of my hand over the screen. The publisher loved it.

An example illustration from the article.


Unfortunately, the magazine went out of business before they had a chance to publish my article. And soon after, Microsoft came out with an update that completely changed the way the handwriting features worked, so my article was moot. But it is still a really great article, and a wonderful example of my skills as a technical writer, photographer, and illustrator. Rather than post the article here, and letting all my beautiful formatting get all munged up by Blogger's HTML handling, I have posted the article up on Scribd.com here.



The contents of this post is Copyright © 2012 by Grant Sheridan Robertson.