Cross-Device Document Annotation Sharing With Consistent Rendering
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional document sharing tools in collaborative environments only share an image of the display screen, leading to inconsistencies in annotations across different devices, as the appearance and location of annotations created on one device may differ on another.
Innovation Solution
A document management system that shares the actual document during an online sharing session, rather than just an image of the screen, ensuring consistent appearance and location of annotations across various devices, using a document database, conversion, sharing, annotation, signature, and tracking modules.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If conventional document sharing tools share an image of the display screen, then the implementation is simple and devices are compatible, but the annotation appearance and location become inconsistent across different devices
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a server as an intermediary between the first device and second devices. The server receives the document and annotation data from the first device, processes it into a standardized format, and distributes it to second devices. This intermediary ensures that annotations appear consistently across different device types while maintaining simple implementation on client devices.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms the document and annotation data into a standardized parameter format on the server side. Instead of sharing raw screen images or device-specific data formats, the system converts all annotation parameters (position, size, type) into a universal representation that can be accurately rendered on any device, ensuring consistency across different display configurations.
2Manufacturing precision
If the actual document is shared instead of a screen image, then annotation consistency is improved, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The server acts as a centralized intermediary that handles the complexity of document management, format conversion, and annotation processing. Client devices (first and second devices) remain relatively simple, focusing only on displaying and interacting with the standardized annotation data provided by the server. This distributes complexity to the server while keeping client devices simple.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates a standardized copy of the document with embedded annotation data that can be distributed to multiple devices. Instead of each device processing the original complex document format independently, the server generates a simplified, standardized copy that contains all necessary annotation information in a device-agnostic format, reducing the processing burden on individual devices.
Data Source
AI summary
A document management system manages documents. The documents are managed such that the documents may be shared with multiple users during an online sharing session. During the online sharing session of a document, the document may be annotated. The appearance and location of the annotation is consistent across the difference devices of the users even though the devices are of different device types.