pdf-tools VS xournalpp

Also https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/706

;; Fix blurry PDFs on MacOS. ;; From https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/51 (setq pdf-view-use-scaling t)

First things first, install pdf-tools, a great Emacs package for viewing pdfs. The default pdf viewer Docview is very limited so you should definitely get this package.

nov.el is pretty nice, although pdf-tools makes PDFs tolerable.

It looks enjoy pdf-tools got a new maintainer and he already changed the the melpa ⠀recipe, so you can get it via the package manager. I think this is a good development. My impression is, that he is new as an Emacs package maintainer, so please be kind and supportive, so he will stay on it for a while. :)

I have been using emacs pdf-tools lately and really enjoying it https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools

View, annotate PDFs and more with Emac's pdf-tools. There is also the built-in doc-view.

[pdf-tools](https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools) will let you do that.

I tried setting (add-hook 'pdf-view-mode-hook (lambda() (linum-mode -1))), which I found here. But it doesn't seem to do anything.

doc-view.el aside, there's https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools which may have its own set of issues.

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!