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.

Drawings created with Rnote

If you have drawn something cool in Rnote and want to share it, submit a PR so it can be showcased here. :)

Building

Build instructions for Linux are documented in BUILDING.md and for other platforms here