Sketch and take handwritten notes.

Rnote is an open-source vector-based drawing app for sketching, handwritten notes and to annotate documents and pictures. Targeted at students, teachers and those who own a drawing tablet, it provides features like PDF and picture import and export, an infinite canvas and an adaptive UI for big and small screens.

Written in Rust and GTK4.

Features

• Adaptive UI focused on stylus input
• Pressure-sensitive stylus input with different and configurable stroke styles
• Draw many different shapes with the shape tool
• Move, rotate, resize and modify existing content with the selection tool
• Different document expansion layouts ( fixed pages, continuous vertical, infinite in every direction, .. )
• Customizable background colors, patterns, sizes
• Customizable page format
• (Optional) pen sounds
• Reconfigurable stylus button shortcuts
• An integrated workspace browser for quick access to related media files
• Drag & drop, clipboard support
• PDF, bitmap and SVG image import
• Save and load the documents in the native .rnote file format
• Document and selection export to SVG, PDF
• Autosave, printing

Disclaimer
The file format is still unstable. It might change and break compatibility between versions.

Rnote has a project website: rnote.flxzt.net

Rnote is available as a flatpak on Flathub:

Downgrading
Because the file format still is unstable, downgrading to a specific version might be necessary and can be done with:

After downgrading, the version can be pinned or unpinned with:

$ flatpak mask com.github.flxzt.rnote
$ flatpak mask --remove com.github.flxzt.rnote

Then the documents can be exported as an SVG or PDF and can be re-imported into the newest version of Rnote.

• Drag & Drop not working - Make sure Rnote has permissions to the locations you are dragging files from. Can be granted in Flatseal (a Flatpak permissions manager)
• odd location for current file - when the directory displayed in the header title is something like /run/user/1000/../, rnote does not have permissions to access the directory. Again, granting them in Flatseal fixes this issue.
• Stylus buttons move canvas / are not functional - make sure that the xf86-input-wacom, drivers on X11 and libinput on Wayland and libwacom are installed and loaded.
• While hovering with the stylus, other input events are blocked in some regions of the screen - Supposed to be palm rejection, but might be undesirable. If there is a left- / righthanded system tablet setting, make sure it is set correctly. Rnote can't do much to disable this unfortunately. ( discussed in issue #329 )

• A huge thanks to the contributors, translators and to all that donated. You are the ones that help keep the project going!
• Freesound is the source for the pen sounds. The individual sounds are credited in sounds/Licenses.md
• Rough.js provides the algorithms for implementation of Rnote's rough shapes.
• Pizarra is an innovative drawing app with advanced shaping and featuring an infinite zoom. It is a great inspiration of the architecture of Rnote. Go check it out!

A great way to contribute to the project without writing code is adding a new or start maintaining an existing translation language. The translations files are located in rnote-ui/po/.

Creating translations for new languages or updating existing ones can be done in two ways:

• take the rnote.pot file and generate a new .po translation file from it, with for example "Poedit". Add the new translation language to LINGUAS and submit a PR with both changed files.
• use weblate for an easy way to translate in the browser without having to deal with git.

If you have any questions or want to start a general discussion, open a topic in the Github Discussions section.
There is also the #rnote:matrix.org chat room.

The .rnote file format is a gzipped json file. It is (de)compressed with the flate2 crate and (de)serialized with the Serde crate.

So far breaking changes in the format happened in versions:

• v0.2.0
• v0.3.0
• v0.4.0
• v0.5.0

To be able to open and export older files that are incompatible with the newest version, look under Installation /Downgrading to install older versions of Rnote.

If you have drawn something cool in Rnote and want to share it, submit a PR so it can be showcased here. :)

Build instructions for Linux are documented in BUILDING.md and for other platforms here