In recent years, various kinds of electronic devices, such as a tablet terminal, a PDA and a smartphone, have been developed. Most of these electronic devices include touch-screen displays for facilitating input operations by users.
By touching a menu or an object, which is displayed on the touch-screen display, by a finger or the like, the user can instruct an electronic device to execute a function which is associated with the menu or object.
However, most of existing electronic devices with touch-screen displays are consumer products which are designed to enhance operability on various media data such as video and music, and are not necessarily suitable for use in a business situation such as a meeting, a business negotiation or product development. Thus, in business situations, paper-based pocket notebooks have still been widely used.
Recently, a technique for determining a relationship between a tablet terminal and the seating position of a user, based on the direction of writing of handwritten characters, has also been developed.
In the meantime, in general, most of tablet terminals have a function of automatically rotating the direction of a screen image in accordance with the direction of the tablet terminal.
However, in a handwriting application which handles a handwritten document, if the direction of the screen image of the application is automatically rotated in accordance with the direction of the tablet terminal, there may be a case in which a feeling of use, such as a feeling of using a real paper-based pocket notebook, cannot be obtained. The reason for this is that if the direction of the screen image is automatically rotated, it would become difficult to handwrite characters, etc. in a free direction on the display screen of the handwriting application.
On the other hand, the handwriting application is required to also have a function as a digital tool for handling a handwritten document as digital data.