eLabFTW VS xournalpp

+1 for https://www.elabftw.net

I use a free electronic lab notebook called eLabFTW

While it already features a molecule/reaction editor, supports a few file formats, it is incomplete in some aspects, and so I'd like to ask you a few questions in order to improve the software. The github discussion is the main place to answer, but I'll reproduce the questions here so you can directly answer below.

You should definitely try eLabFTW, it's an open source LIMS/ELN: https://www.elabftw.net/

I have built and maintained eLabFTW. See my full comment here:

Yes eLabFTW is a great electronic lab notebook. But it's better to have it installed at the institution level, like many universities and research centers do. Installing it for your group only at the beginning is a valid option, too. The other comments only mention proprietary software. eLabFTW is fully open source, and I think it's important to mention.

You really should have a look at eLabFTW, it is capable of a lot of things and tailored for experimental logging. Also, it's free and open source ;)

Open source https://www.elabftw.net/

eLabFTW lead dev here. As /u/Euphoric_Confusion_3 mentionned, eLabFTW is pretty flexible (you can customize a lot of how things are named) and fits all your criteria. Check out the live demo: https://demo.elabftw.net

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!