xournalpp VS onenote

I tried a whole bunch of the these apps, and I decided that Xournal++ [1] is better than Rnote for note taking. However, I have used Openboard [2] for teaching online since 2020.

I agree that Rnote's smoothing is better, but it's tool selection UX is terrible. There are three different bars (top, bottom, and side), and you often need to move your mouse/hand to all of them across the screen in order to select the right tool. In Xournal++ I can put everything on the top bar.

Xournal++ has it's own problems. Pasting an image always makes it so big, that resizing to the correct size is difficult. It also doesn't have a laser pointer, which is why I can't use it for teaching. Creating a new document with the correct template is also painful.

Honestly, in another life, I would write a decent note-taking app.

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

[2] https://github.com/OpenBoard-org/OpenBoard/

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.

OneNote for Linux: https://github.com/patrikx3/onenote

It's not great, but there is P3X OneNote. It's basically an "electron" version of web OneNote.

Maybe guys you wish to try this OneNote for Linux edition. I doubt that it differs alot from the website version, but it adds desktop tray icons + other OS integrations, so looks like decent solution for Linux users https://github.com/patrikx3/onenote

In fact, lemme check it in a bit. That said, what's wrong with using the web or P3X's front-end? Pure web-based can be slow, yeah, but P3X's front-end has pretty good caching and extra functions that I think it works pretty well still.

And Onenote is this

No flatpak yet but review some alternatives.