Rnote – A simple note taking application written in Rust and GTK4

A simple note taking application written in Rust and GTK4.

Rnote aims to be a simple but functional note taking application for freehand drawing or annotating pictures or documents. It eventually should be able to import / export various media file formats.


One main consideration is that it is vector based, which should make it very flexible in editing and altering the contents.

Disclaimer


This is my first Rust and GTK project and I am learning as I go along. Expect some bugs and crashes. Also, the file format is still unstable and will change between versions!

Installation

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

Screenshots

If you have drawn something cool in Rnote and want to share it, let me know so I can include it as a screenshot. 🙂

Pitfalls

• Drag & Drop: Make sure Rnote has permissions to the locations you are dragging files from. Can be granted in Flatseal (a Flatpak permissions manager)

To-Do

• switch geometry to nalgebra wherever possible. It can operate on f64 and has much more features than graphene.
• printing & PDF export
• PDF import ( as vector & bitmap )
• vector & bitmap picture import
• implement bezier curve stroke with variable stroke width
  (see Quadratic bezier offsetting with selective subdivision,
  Precise offsetting of bezier curves)
• Textured brush strokes with tweakable parameters
• Stroke elements drag tool: drag along parts of the selected strokes based on the proximity of a round pen tool
• parallelizing rendering and actions which affect many strokes.
• asychronous rendering
• cancellable rendering
• strokes rotation
• (implemented: lines, rectangles, ellipses) drawing rough shapes by porting rough.js to Rust (see ./src/rough-rs)
• export as bitmap picture
• implement text fields (Plain, Markdown)
• implement optional stroke smoothing

Feature Ideas:

• Stroke Layers
• History list
  • with the ability to move them up and down the history
• Stroke trash restorer
  • with a preview of the deleted strokes
• Stylus buttons configuration to map them to different actions and / or pen types
• Locked strokes: mode to toggle the mutability of strokes
• Multiple sheet tabs
• Share and synchronize sheets with others ( via e.g. the peer-2-peer protocol libp2p ).

File Format

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 the first breaking change in the format happened between v0.1.6 and v0.2.0.

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.

Build instructions and guidelines how to contribute are outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md