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HardwareTablet PCHow to ink in GMail

How to ink in GMail

How can you send ink in GMail? After all, the GMail editor doesn’t even support ink. Well, actually, although it’s true that GMail doesn’t support ink, it does allow public images to be embedded in an email’s contents. This means that you can send images of ink via GMail without too much hassle.

Here’s a snapshot of an email message I composed that contains two inked images (a drawing and a hand-written signature):

InkInGMailSmall.png

Notice: This is a snapshot of an email message being edited live in the GMail editor and it contains inked drawings. Cool, isn’t it?

Now what about when a person receives the email message? What will it look like? Here’s the contents of the email message above that I recevied back after a reply:

InkInGMailViewing.png

(You do have to enable the viewing of the images, however. For security reasons, the email viewers disable image display.)

Here’s how to include ink in a GMail message:

1. Begin composing your email message as normal.
2. Create your inked contents and post them to a server. Use your browser to navigate to that location to view the image. Drag and drop the image(s) from the browser to where you want them in the email message. Alternatively, you can use an online ink canvas, such as in TabletPCBlogs, which I’ll describe in a section below.
3. You can click on and resize the images if needed. Formatting is rather limited, but maybe Google will improve this in the future.
4. Send the email as normal.
5. When the recipient receives the email, they may have to enable viewing of images in the emaill. GMail disables images by default, for instance. This is done for security reasons.

Note: The images have to be public. What’s really going on here is that the email is not really storing the ink/image. It’s storing a link to the image on the server you copied the image from. In order for the recipient of the email on the other end to be able to view the drawings in the email, the images have to be on a public server. Their email viewer has to be able to access the image. So if you copy/pasted a drawing from a local app you used or a local file on your machine, the recipient won’t be able to view your ink creation. I’ve noticed that several of the email apps show gray boxes where the images should have appeared in these cases.

Some caveats:
* Once you paste the image into the GMail editor, the ink is gone. If you resize the image, you are not resizing the strokes, you are resizing the bitmap, so the quality of the image will rapidly degrade. Generally, you should size the drawing to what you’d like it to be before you paste it into the email message.
* The drawings in your emails must be public. This is a showstopper for using ink in emails in general, but it doesn’t preclude all uses of inking. A signature image is one example. You might want to share a drawing you’ve posted made as another.

How to add your own inked signature to GMail using TabletPCBlogs:

1. Create a post on TabletPCBlogs (assuming you have already set up an account). In that post use the “Whiteboard” feature to handwrite the signature you want to have at the end of your emails. You’ll need to include at least some text in the post or if you don’t want to type anything enter the five characters: [Ink] in the text area for the post. Click on the “Post” button when done. Here’s a signature image I created for myself, for instance.
Tip: Make your signature exactly the size you want it to be in the emails. It’ll look better if you don’t have to scale the image after you add it to the email.
2. View your blog post to see if the image is there and the way you want it.
3. Begin composing your email message in GMail.
4. Open the browser to view the signature you posted in Step 1.
5. Drag and drop (or copy/paste) the inked signature image to the end of your email.
6. Send the email as normal. The recipient will be able to see your inked signature.

I spent awhile dreaming up a service that could host images, but then I realized that this isn’t the best solution. Who wants their inked emails public after all? What we need is for GMail to automatically store the images as attachments and place “links” to these attachments within the emails. This is the way Outlook handles ink.

If GMail supported embedding of images (which are passed along with the emails as attachments) to create an inked email message all you’d need to do is fire up Journal, OneNote, or a similar ink-enabled app, draw your ink in one of these apps, then copy/paste the ink to where you want it your email. The paste action should convert the ink to an image that can be emailed.

I never realized until the other day how close we are to having ink in browser-based emails, such as with GMail. It also really gets me thinking about how an editor in MovableType or similar browser-based blogging tools should work. Can you image what it would be like if we could ink in a helper window that supports ink (and uploads the drawing to a server), then allows you to drag and drop the image to a WYSIWYG-like editor? It would change the way I blog. Oh, if I only had 15 minutes with the developers of these services…..

Loren
Lorenhttp://www.lorenheiny.com
Loren Heiny (1961 - 2010) was a software developer and author of several computer language textbooks. He graduated from Arizona State University in computer science. His first love was robotics.

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  1. I hate Gmail. By the way, if you want, I created a really handy SnagIt add on that copies the snag’d output to a UNC path and then copies a HTTP URL to that image to the clipboard. Let me know if you want it.

  2. Your little app would help with one way to work around the problem. I contemplated building a service that people could use to post their email ink, but since the ink would need to be public, I decided this wasn’t the best way to go.

    While we’re waiting for a way for Google to attach embedded images, we can use images posted via blogs and the like. It’ll make the usage more restrictive, but nonetheless it can work quite well.