Rnote

Sketch and take handwritten notes.

Rnote is an open-source vector-based drawing app for sketching, handwritten notes and to annotate documents and pictures. Targeted at students, teachers and those who own a drawing tablet, it provides features like PDF and picture import and export, an infinite canvas and an adaptive UI for big and small screens.

Written in Rust and GTK4.

Features

Adaptive UI focused on stylus input
Pressure-sensitive stylus input with different and configurable stroke styles
Draw many different shapes with the shape tool
Move, rotate, resize and modify existing content with the selection tool
Different document expand layouts ( fixed pages, continuous vertical, infinite in every direction )
Customizable background colors, patterns, sizes
Customizable page format
(optional) pen sounds
Reconfigurable stylus button shortcuts
An integrated workspace browser for quick access to related media files
Drag & drop, clipboard support
PDF, bitmap and SVG image import
Save and load the documents in the native .rnote file format
Document and selection export to SVG, PDF
Autosave, printing

Disclaimer
The file format is still unstable. It might change and break compatibility between versions.

Website

Rnote has a project website: rnote.flxzt.net

Installation

Rnote is available as a flatpak on Flathub:

Downgrading
Because the file format still is unstable, downgrading to a specific version might be necessary and can be done with:

version	command
v0.4.0	`sudo flatpak update --commit=2ee585842334ad976802f08a1952c3fdc40f6f3afe2e056f3597fe4a029d54d2 com.github.flxzt.rnote`
v0.3.5	`sudo flatpak update --commit=34115ec5896cbe1b7c1b7a589ec2b6da45e9fcbd81ae53c665c08f2fc42bb52f com.github.flxzt.rnote`
v0.2.5	`sudo flatpak update --commit=2036a51c8118a30eb4ceb2e16ba2f84fa8ca4dc814fb88d9424709380093a6c6 com.github.flxzt.rnote`
v0.1.6	`sudo flatpak update --commit=ffb9781989704f3eb28910437bb26709357566a977178d5fb4ef1a2926edae8b com.github.flxzt.rnote`

After downgrading, the version can be pinned or unpinned with:

$ flatpak mask com.github.flxzt.rnote
$ flatpak mask --remove com.github.flxzt.rnote

Then the documents can be exported as an SVG or PDF and can be re-imported into the newest version of Rnote.

Screenshots

Pitfalls & known issues

Drag & Drop: Make sure Rnote has permissions to the locations you are dragging files from. Can be granted in Flatseal (a Flatpak permissions manager)
odd location for current file: when the directory displayed in the header title is something like /run/user/1000/../, rnote does not have permissions to access the directory. Again, granting them in Flatseal fixes this issue.
Stylus buttons move canvas / are not functional: make sure that the xf86-input-wacom, drivers on X11 and libinput on Wayland and libwacom are installed and loaded.

Credits

A huge thanks to the contributors, translators and to all that donated. You are the ones that help keep the project going!
Freesound is the source for the pen sounds. The individual sounds are credited in sounds/Licenses.md
Rough.js provides the algorithms for implementation of Rnote's rough shapes.
Pizarra is an innovative drawing app with advanced shaping and featuring an infinite zoom. It is a great inspiration of the architecture of Rnote. Go check it out!

Translations

A great way to contribute to the project without writing code is adding and maintaining a new translation language. The translations files are located in rnote-ui/po/.

Creating translations for new languages or updating existing ones can be done in two ways:

take rnote.pot and generate a new .po translation file from it, add the new translation language to LINGUAS and submit a PR.
use weblate for an easy way to translate in the browser without having to deal with git.

Community

If you have any questions or want to start a general discussion, open a topic in the Github Discussions section.
There is also the #rnote:matrix.org chat room.

File Format

The .rnote file format is a gzipped json file. It is (de)compressed with the flate2 crate and (de)serialized with the Serde crate.

So far breaking changes in the format happened in versions:

v0.2.0
v0.3.0
v0.4.0
v0.5.0

To be able to open and export older files that are incompatible with the newest version, look under Installation /Downgrading to install older versions of Rnote.