Craig Pringle has gone through the hard effort to create a screencast video of InfoPath's inking feature: Blog:: Craig Pringle - Ink in Infopath Screencast. Thanks, Craig!

I was fortunate to have this work on my InfoPath dev team as one of the many features we added to InfoPath 2003 SP1. As Craig showed, you can just start inking ontop of your InfoPath form and InfoPath will convert your ink into text.

Based on where you start inking we determine what control the ink should go into. Also, note you don't have to limit your inking just to the region of the control! :-)

If you pause your inking, we'll just kick in and convert it. If you'd like a quicker convert, you can customize this pause time under Tools->Options->Ink.

For InfoPath 2003 SP1, we do some basic from field data type detection regarding if this form's design has a field as a number or a date or such and pass that on to the ink conversion code as a hint for better recognition.

For the next version of Office, we've exposed to the form designer the standard input-scopes for use in recognition (e.g., IS_EMAIL_SMTPADDRESS) along with allowing you to drop into a custom recognition input scope, based on phrase list or regular expression. Better reco is better.

Also adding in InfoPath 2003 SP1 around ink that you can use everyday right now:

• The ink picture now supports a static background picture. One scenario might be if you had to mark-up damage to a generic car as part of an insurance report.
• You can now insert ink-sections into rich-text fields. Maybe this is just a drawing or a sketch to keep in your rich text. Maybe you just want to ink some notes here and convert it later. Your choice. To try it out: while your focus is in a rich text field, go to Insert->Ink Drawing and Writing. (Note that some rich text fields can be dialed down in the form design not to support complex graphical features.)

But as Craig shows, just plain inking ontop of the form is one of the more rewarding features we were able to ship.

Bonus tip: one of the gestures we support is scratch-out! So, if you want to clear content, just scratch out right on top of it!