Ed Holloway has released an beta update to his excellent Live Writer plugin that provides ink support.
Live Writer is a rich client blogging app under development at Microsoft. You can get it here.
After you’ve installed Live Writer you can download and install Ed’s ink plugin.
You’ll need the .Net 2.0 framework. Ed has a link on his blog post. You can tell if you have .Net 2.0 installed by:
* Click on the Start button in Windows
* In the popup menu, select “Control Panel”
* In the “Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0”
You’ll also need the Microsoft.Ink.dll CLR2.0 update (KB900722) for the ink in the program to function properly.
The Live Writer Ink plugin is in beta (as is Live Writer itself) so if you’re unsure about using beta apps, you may want to wait a bit. Ed is “promising” a refresh by October when this particular plugin will expire.
What do I think? The plugin works great. I would like to see more control over the positioning of the ink, however. For instance, I want to right justify the inked image, push its alignment up or down, add a border, and so on. I tried manually editing the “img” tag (by switching to the HTML Code view in Live Writer) and when I added an “align=right” attribute to push the ink to the right of the page, the ink disappeared. To get the ink to the right of the page in this post I copy/pasted the img block of HTML code, which then appeared to create a new image and then I used the image properties to right justify the “ink” and place a dropshadow border around the drawing. Maybe I did something wrong while editing the HTML–in fact, Live Writer seems to have messed up some other parts of my post. Hmmm. Could be a Live Writer bug. Anyway, I hope this post which I’m creating in Live Writer using the ink plugin works. Let’s see. Time to post….
