BetterNoteBooks

BetterNoteBooks is a modern, high-performance GoodNotes-style digital notebook, vector drawing, and handwriting plugin built natively for Obsidian.

Organize multi-page digital notebooks directly inside your Obsidian vault, sketch and take notes with pressure-sensitive pens, highlight seamlessly under text, snap to clean geometric shapes, use advanced lasso selection, and write naturally with complete stylus-only palm rejection.

✨ Key Features

📖 Native Notebook Management

• Vault-native storage: Notebooks are saved as standard files directly in your vault (.bnp format).
• Fast notebook switching: Switch between notebooks or create new ones via the top navigation toolbar.
• Background auto-save: Work without worrying about losing edits; changes are saved automatically.
• Clean start: Automatically opens a pristine blank document with your chosen default paper format and template.

✍️ Natural Handwriting & Vector Inking

• Flawless vector curves: Responsive inking rendered via smooth continuous Bézier curves without stepping or bead artifacts.
• Line styles: Draw with Solid (—), Dashed (- -), or Dotted (···) lines in real time across Pen, Highlighter, and Shape tools.
• Customizable smoothing: Configurable stroke smoothing algorithm to eliminate jitter.
• Zoom-adaptive line thickness: Zoomed-in writing produces proportionally fine, ultra-sharp text.
• Direct tool popover: Instant access to line style, smoothing, and palm rejection directly from the pen button or dropdown caret (▾).
• Quick size slots: Two customizable size slots on the toolbar for instant thickness toggling. Click or right-click to fine-tune thickness via an inline popover.

🖍️ Realistic Highlighter

• Color blending: Highlighters use realistic multiply blending that lets background paper lines shine through.
• Layering intelligence: Highlighter strokes automatically render beneath pen ink, preserving clear handwriting legibility just like on physical paper.
• Uniform live inking: Single-path rendering eliminates dark multiplier stacking or muddy overlapping caps during dragging.
• Highlighter settings: Direct popover card offering line styles (solid, dashed, dotted) and opacity presets (100%, 75%, 50%).

🧹 Precision & Stroke Eraser

• Two erasing modes:
  • Stroke eraser: Erases entire lines on contact.
  • Precision eraser: Excises exact segments touching the eraser circle with mathematical precision.
• Direct popover menu: Switch modes, choose radius presets (8px, 16px, 28px), or clear active page ink with one tap.
• Anthracite cursor indicator: Displays an elegant anthracite radius circle only while actively hovering and erasing over the canvas.

🧲 Advanced Lasso Tool

• Freehand & rectangle selection: Select handwriting, shapes, and images effortlessly.
• Granular element filters: Selectively include or exclude handwriting, highlighters, geometric shapes, or images.
• Direct popover & floating bar:
  • Change color: Batch-recolor selected handwriting or shapes.
  • Duplicate & Transform: Move, scale, duplicate, or delete elements with a single click.
  • Clipboard support: Copy (Ctrl/Cmd+C) and Paste (Ctrl/Cmd+V) across pages and notebooks.

🎨 Compact Horizontal Color Slider Carousel

• Swipeable & scrollable carousel: An ergonomic horizontal color track equipped with navigation chevrons.
• Custom color modal: Add custom colors with curated palette presets, HEX code input, and built-in eyedropper support.
• Quick deletion: Right-click any color swatch to remove it from your active palette.

📐 Geometric Shape Recognition (Draw & Hold)

• Automatic snap: Draw any shape and hold the pen still at the end to snap into clean vectors:
  • Lines, connected polylines, and arrows
  • Arcs, circles, and ellipses
  • Rectangles, squares, and triangles
• Direct shape popover: Configure line styles (solid, dashed, dotted), contour opacity (100%, 75%, 50%), and auto-fill toggle.
• Interactive transform handles: Fine-tune vertices, radius, line style, opacity, and position locking after drawing.

✋ Stylus-Only Mode (Palm Rejection)

• Accidental touch protection: When stylus mode is active, only digital pen input creates ink.
• Fluid gestures: Use your fingers exclusively for smooth panning, scrolling, and pinch-to-zoom without unwanted ink spots.

📄 Multi-Page & Customizable Paper Templates

• Standard formats: DIN A4, DIN A5, DIN A3, and US Letter.
• Orientations: Portrait & Landscape.
• Background grids: Ruled (lined), Grid (squared), Dotted, and Blank.
• Sidebar & topic organizer: Search pages and topic groups, reorder, duplicate, or delete pages, and assign custom subject tags.

🌍 Multi-Language & Full RTL Support (14 Languages)

• Fully localized interface in 14 languages:
  • English, German (Deutsch), Mandarin Chinese (中文), Hindi (हिन्दी), Spanish (Español), French (Français), Arabic (العربية), Bengali (বাংলা), Portuguese (Português), Russian (Русский), Urdu (اردو), Kurdish Sorani (سۆرانی), Kurdish Kurmanji (Kurmancî), and Kurdish Southern / Kelhuri (کەڵهوڕی).
• Live language switching: Changing languages in settings updates open notebook views instantly without restarting Obsidian.
• Right-to-Left (RTL): Native RTL layout mirroring for Arabic, Urdu, and Kurdish.
• Reading-direction marquee ticker: Overlong button labels and notebook titles smoothly glide across in reading direction on hover so text is always readable.

🚀 Installation

Via Obsidian Community Plugins (Recommended)

1. Open Obsidian Settings → Community plugins.
2. Ensure Restricted mode is turned off.
3. Click Browse and search for BetterNoteBooks.
4. Click Install, then Enable.

Manual Installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest GitHub Release.
2. Create a folder named betternotebooks inside your vault under:

   <YourVault>/.obsidian/plugins/betternotebooks/
   

3. Copy the three files into that folder.
4. Reload Obsidian and enable BetterNoteBooks under Settings → Community plugins.

📝 What's New in v1.1.1

🖌️ Smooth Vector Inking & Zero Beading

• Continuous Bézier Rendering: Completely eliminated the "caterpillar / bead" artifact and stepped thickness jumps on pen strokes. Strokes now draw as flawless, unified vector paths.
• 120 FPS Buttery Smooth: Non-destructive offscreen snapshotting provides lightning-fast, zero-lag inking even during rapid handwriting or scribbles.

🎛️ Direct Tool Popover Cards

• Direct & Unnested UI: Clicking the dropdown arrow (▾) or active tool button opens a clean, modern Popover Card (Pen, Highlighter, Eraser, Shapes, Lasso) without intermediate context menus.
• Bespoke Vector SVG Line Previews: Replaced generic icons with crisp, custom SVG line style previews (Solid, Dashed, Dotted) that glow with your active Obsidian theme accent color.

📏 Real-Time Dashed & Dotted Vector Lines

• Live In-Progress Drawing: Dashed and dotted styles now render in real time as you drag your stylus across all drawing tools (Pen, Highlighter, Shapes), without requiring gesture-holds.

🖍️ Non-Destructive Live Highlighter

• No Dark Overlap Stacking: Solved the issue where rapid highlighter dragging caused overlapping caps in multiply mode to compound into black. Highlighters remain luminous, translucent, and uniform throughout the entire stroke.
• Full Settings Integration: Added opacity controls (100%, 75%, 50%) and line style options to the Highlighter popover card.

🧪 Comprehensive Quality & Test Suite

• Added 53 comprehensive unit tests covering the notebook engine, spatial geometry, Ramer-Douglas-Peucker shape recognition, and lasso math.
• 0 lint errors, 100% Obsidian Developer Policy compliance.

📝 What's New in v1.1.0

🌐 Internationalization & RTL

• Added support for 14 languages with automatic locale detection and instant live language switching.
• Complete Right-to-Left (RTL) UI mirroring for Arabic, Urdu, Kurdish Sorani, and Southern Kurdish.
• Reading-direction marquee ticker animations that smoothly reveal overlong text on hover.
• Dynamic page title localization for clean display in every language.

🧲 Advanced Lasso Tool

• Freehand and rectangular selection modes with selective filtering (pen, highlighter, shapes, images).
• Floating action bar for instant color changing, duplicating, clipboard copying, pasting, and deletion.

🎨 Color Carousel & Toolbar Optimization

• Replaced overflowing color tracks with a compact, scrollable horizontal slider carousel.
• Clean navigation chevrons and custom color dialog with curated swatches, hex inputs, and eyedropper.

✏️ Quick Size Slots & Anthracite Eraser

• Dual quick-switch size slots for pen, highlighter, shapes, and eraser.
• Click or right-click size slots to open instant adjustment popovers.
• Fixed eraser cursor to only show when actively drawing/erasing, styled with an elegant anthracite indicator.

📑 Sidebar & Template Enhancements

• Localized sidebar search and topic grouping.
• Compact quick-template dropdown menu.
• Clean blank notebook startup layout.

🛠️ Development

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Run dev mode with watch
npm run dev

# Build production bundle
npm run build

# Run unit tests
npm test

# Run lint checks
npm run lint

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.