The HCI Paradigm of HyperPrinting

Abstract

Today, printing and reverse printing (scanning, OCR, logical labeling etc.) technologies have become quite mature and thus allow for an easy transition of documents between physical and electronic world. However, there is no technology today which supports the lossless interpretation of paper-based user interaction with direct effects upon the electronic representation of that document. The HyperPrinting environment tries to fill in this gap and thus accounts for the personal favors of a majority of office workers: Not only managers and knowledge workers prefer to read longer documents, articles or news from paper in contrast to a computer monitor or handheld computer. With the help of HyperPrinting, users can annotate, send notes or initiate tasks and it thus offers a completely new paradigm in the usage and treatment of paper documents. As a side-effect, the use of HyperPrinting builds up a document repository which is not only searchable by full text but also by meta-information, which in turn is depending on the selected user scenario.