Ink Serialized Format or ISF is a Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 format to store written ink information.
The format is mainly used for mobile devices like Personal digital assistant

Personal digital assistant

A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...

s, tablet PC

Tablet computer

A tablet computer, or simply tablet, is a complete mobile computer, larger than a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, integrated into a flat touch screen and primarily operated by touching the screen...

s and Ultra-Mobile PC

Ultra-Mobile PC

An ultra-mobile PC is a small form factor version of a pen computer, a class of laptop whose specifications were launched by Microsoft and Intel in spring 2006. Sony had already made a first attempt in this direction in 2004 with its Vaio U series, which was however only sold in Asia...

s to store data entered with a stylus

Stylus (computing)

In computing, a stylus is a small pen-shaped instrument that is used to input commands to a computer screen, mobile device or graphics tablet...

.

An ink object is simply a sequence of strokes, where each stroke is a sequence of points, and the points are X, and Y coordinates. Many of the new mobile devices can also provide information such as pressure, and angle. In addition can be used to store custom information along with the ink data.

Availability

Its specification is freely available for download. Microsoft has added the ISF format to its technologies available under the Open Specification Promise

Microsoft Open Specification Promise

The Microsoft Open Specification Promise , is a promise by Microsoft, published in September 2006, to not assert legal rights over certain Microsoft patents on implementations of an included list of technologies....

 making ISF related technology patent claims available for everybody to use or implement ISF.

This allows for ISF format to be used even together with open source software licensing like GPL2.

External links

• Integrating Ink on mobile devices Ink article on MSDN