Inking is a broad term that actually represents a set of technologies. To make inking work properly there are a number of technologies which should work together. Generally Microsoft Research teams were involved in solving the technological challenges that came together as inking.

First of all, one has to look at the hardware considerations because this input screen should have some special features. An electromagnetic field has to be created by a digitizer overlain on the LCD screen of Tablet PC's. As soon as the pen touches the screen, it comes in contact with the electromagnetic field of that screen and then a series of data points on the screen prove the reflection of its motion. Via a special process, which is known as sampling, the digitizer gathers information from movement of the pen when it continues to move across the screen. The sampling capacity of Tablet PC digitizer is 130 "pen events" -- units per second. These electromagnetic pen events are then visualized on the screen as pen strokes.

As the user writes on the LCD screen, digital ink appears to flow at the same speed that the pen writes on the screen, (as it has a high sampling rate), thus the Tablet PC is able to create the effect of "real-time inking."

Another advantage of this high capacity of sampling rate is that it makes the written ink able to be displayed and stored with very high graphical resolution. This is very important for visual legibility on the screen and also essential for maximizing the accuracy during the process of handwriting recognition. However, we should remember that the handwriting recognition is inherently a statistical process. For some users it will work nicely, but for others it may not.

Another thing to remember is each of the supported languages, such as American and International English, German, French, Japanese, etc. has its own recognizer engine which stores handwriting samples that are language-specific.