TabletFriend VS xournalpp

TabletFriend is a pretty nice free open source app. It opens up a floating window with a bunch of useful commands such as undo and redo. It can also be customized to your liking

Often you also need a toolbar with common buttons and shortcuts. Not mandatory, but makes life much easier. I wrote a program that does pretty much that. https://github.com/Martenfur/TabletFriend

I tell that using Rainmeter is going to be the solution to this. Clicking the Esc button you created works instantly, whereas this overlay program I tried only worked after clicking it between 4-11 times and GestureSign didn't work at all.

This might be a useful app to put on that touchscreen. It was designed for artists in mind, but you can put any key/macro you want on it.

Searching desperately for a solution I stumbled across Tablet Friend on this Subreddit, spent a few hours configuring it to meet my requirements, and boy, the results were worth sharing, (therefore this post). A simple toolbar to scroll around the document, combined with some other tweaks in Xournal++'s settings menu, resulted in a very robust and enjoyable workflow for annotating documents. (and taking notes if you are looking away from OneNote).

DOWNLOAD v1.0: https://github.com/Martenfur/TabletFriend

I'll make a new post here when it releases. I also post updates on tabletpcreviews forum. http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/threads/tablet-friend-a-decent-toolbar.76001/page-2 And you can literally download and start using the beta right now (assuming you have the time to compile C# and if fine with the absence of any docs): https://github.com/Martenfur/TabletFriend

I highly recommend Rnote to anyone on Linux that misses the "hodgepodge" notetaking of apps like OneNote. It works like a dream on touchscreens and drawing tablets, with a surprising amount of configuration under the hood.

Also worth noting is Xournal, an older but similar project: https://xournalpp.github.io/

I've been using Xournalpp[1] for many years, highlighting books as I read them, adding in text/hand drawn annotations in whitespaces if necessary. Unlike other PDF readers/annotators, it saves a separate file, so the original PDF is untouched. It can also export the annotated PDF as a new PDF with highlights and annotations.

Obsidian[2] also has PDF support, where you can open a markdown document side by side with the PDF to take notes as you read. I think it also lets you highlight the PDF itself.

Emacs I think has a similar feature, via plugins/org-mode(?) to the Obsidian setup.

And of course your typical PDF reader probably has support for highlighting PDFs too, but I find them clunky and they save by exporting a PDF, which can be a bit heavy-handed IMO compared to just saving the annotations/highlights as a separate file as Xournalpp does.

[1]: https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/

Currently, I am trying to build a small open source NLP project for which I first find text on a page and then translate it; see the current project state here: https://github.com/PellelNitram/xournalpp_htr. The purpose of this project is to make handwritten text in Xournal++ searchable for all users.

[Xournal++](https://xournalpp.github.io/) is in my option the best handwritten note-taking software out there, because it has all the coolest features (like LaTeX snippets and shapes) and it's open source too, so make sure to check it out!