xournalpp VS rnote

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.

I mostly use Obsidian, but I do keep coming back to Zim for quickly jotting things down. It's fast and keyboard-oriented, but also includes most functionality under a WYSIWYG menu (unlike Obsidian). It's nice, if you like that fresh Free Software feel without the web technology crammed in.

Also worth mentioning is Rnote, more oriented towards handwriting and feels closer to OneNote: https://github.com/flxzt/rnote

Give rnote a shot.

You can use Rnote too: https://github.com/flxzt/rnote

I'm using Rnote which focuses on handwritten notes but also can do typed text and many other things. It is available for Windows and Linux: https://github.com/flxzt/rnote

Rnote perhaps? https://rnote.flxzt.net/

RNote itself does support ARM, see answer from the developer, but apparently crostini doesn't support Stylus, which is a deal breaker...