concepts-artboards VS Lorien

I use https://concepts.app/en/ for all iPad drawing. It features an infinite canvas, and is tuned for beautiful architectural drawings. I use it for math notes and illustration.

Like my academic colleagues, I was forced onto an iPad (I love chalk and paper) in order to teach remotely. Most of us settled on Notability, too freaked out to learn more than necessary to barely cope. Some realized that one wants all the algorithmic reach one can master, in this new medium. Concepts has many frustrating limitations, but in my opinion it is currently best of field.

In the far future, people will look back on 20th century mathematical notation as a form of sadism (here, look at my crappy machine code, and guess my thoughts!), and they'll mark the pandemic as a turning point where more effective visual forms of explanation first emerged. Playing with Concepts is a glimpse into the future.

While Concepts isn't limited to what can be rendered in SVG or PDF as scalable vector art, one can impose this limit on oneself.

One might have many requirements, choosing an iPad drawing program. My first requirement is that my handwriting doesn't suggest I've suffered a stroke. Believe it or not, this eliminates most of the field. Concepts has a smoothing parameter that makes one's handwriting look better than it would on paper, if one selects 8% to 12%.

I wrote a small SVG filter to convert Concepts artboards to paged PDF documents and diagrams that can be inserted into papers: https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards

Yes. Pandemic professor here, often grading take-home exams. The hardest to look at have uneven illumination, making removing the background dependent on position.

I've thought often of writing something like this code.

For my own writing I've moved to an iPad and an Apple Pencil. Concepts has become my favorite app for algorithmic drawing, though it's not without frustrations. I found it necessary to script converting an infinite canvas to PDF pages: https://github.com/Syzygies/concepts-artboards

Ideally, one wants to write scripts for cleaning up hand drawn notes in an efficient language, and let it run overnight. Better background detection is the tip of the iceberg; one wants to employ machine learning algorithms to infer what you would have drawn with better motor control. This could then be used to translate computer-generated animation into hand-drawn animation, exactly as if there were a thousand of you working for Disney in the time of Fantasia.

Completely agreed! I've been meaning to write a blog post on using Godot to professionally create cross-platform applications (and probably will soon). The short of it is that Godot is fantastic as a UI builder, and I think a lot of people are slowly realizing it. Many professional applications have been built with Godot[0] , and I also want to give a shoutout to Lorien[1] which is my favorite whiteboard application also made in Godot, and what partially inspired this whole project.

[0]: https://alfredbaudisch.com/blog/gamedev/godot-engine/standal...

[1]: https://github.com/mbrlabs/Lorien

another example of an interesting application for godot that's not a game is https://github.com/mbrlabs/Lorien - an infinite canvas for drawing.

Did you try this?

Lorien

[Lorien](https://github.com/mbrlabs/Lorien)

https://github.com/mbrlabs/Lorien (wip, apparently)