Smartish Paper

Question: Given the information density of a standard document and the current ability of printing and scanning technology, how long will it be before the human readable information we print in a document is replicated in a condensed 'smart spot' micro barcode at the corner of the page?

Here's what I'm thinking, I've got all the papers from my Japanese class, some of them are 'cheat sheets' of terms that I am trying to memorize. Some of them are test questions that my teacher gave to me. The idea that a single page of text information could be encoded into a small area and scanned by an optical pickup (think optical mouse or small embedded sensor) to be edited and reprinted seems sort of obvious. I mean, there's a couple hundred kb of compressed info on a page, with 1200+ dpi printing and some robust error correction how hard would it really be to print an info spot at the corner of each page that makes the document 'smart?' Why should I have to retype things or have to keep both digital and hard copies, or scan the non machine formatted human readable text? I'm just asking...

Posted on February 19, 2006 4:12 PM


Comments

Good idea! I suppose someone might have thought of this but you should check and see--you might be surprised. If it ain't you should GPL or patent the idea at once.

Ask around at work. I'll ask my friends to see if someone has thought of this.

But it seems like a great shortcut for scanning newer hardcopy. You could place a document in the scanner and the OCR program would automatically look for the microdot and use that first instead of messing around with interpreting printed characters. If it finds no dot, it falls back to OCR.

You could include a module of code in all major word processors to put this dot of compressed info in the corner of every page they send to the printer.

The limit seems to be the resolution of the scanner and the clarity of the barcode. It could get quite high. The microdot could contain far more information than is encoded in the human readable text-- merely 1024 to 2048 bytes or so. Hyperlinks, metadata, map legends and images could be compressed in there to be extracted in digital form.

Hm. Maybe this could be suggested to the W3C as extension to print media CSS. When someone prints out a web page, the links could be encoded in the dot to be extracted later when the page is OCR'd.

Posted by: Pace Arko Author Profile Page | February 22, 2006 5:56 PM Gravatar Icon

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February 19, 2006