I have recently initiated a collaboration with François Guimbretière. He has developed a novel approach that he terms Paper Augmented Digital Documents (PADD). In this approach the digital and paper world are on equal footing: paper and computers are simply two different ways to interact with documents during their life cycle. When paper affordances are needed, a document is retreived from the database and printed. The printer acts as a normal printer but adds a pen-readable pattern to each document. Using a digital pen, the document can now be marked like a normal paper document. The strokes collected by the pen are combined with the digital version of the document. The resulting augmented document can then be edited, shared, archived, or participate in further cycles between the paper and digital worlds.

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