Handwriting

Handwrite, highlight, erase and lasso directly on your notes and PDFs. Your notes stay Markdown.

Open a note and write. The note stays a .md file.

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removing the plugin

your ink is not stored "in" the markdown. it lives in a folder at your vault root, separate from the editor's text.

disable the plugin and your notes STAY EXACTLY THE SAME - the ink just stops rendering. re-enable and it comes back.

one line is written to the invisible frontmatter of a note when you first write on it - handwriting-page-id.

a note you never inked on is never modified.

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why i built this

back in uni i remember taking biochem notes on my new surface pro 4 with stars in my eyes. drawing structures and typing labels on the same OneNote page felt like literal magic. i can still remember how good it felt, how proud i was showing my notes to friends and professors

ten years later, now for work, I'm still using onenote - and i consider it a prison. things change.

Obsidian has almost reached feature-parity but there's one last integration that keeps me coming back into the hands of Microsoft.

Handwriting is OneNote's last bastion.

not to wax poetic but i am beyond ready to break out.

Handwriting is designed for students, educators, engineers, artists, or anyone who needs to handwrite and type in Obsidian.

i designed this app with a decade of OneNote experience driving my tastes, so a few of the quirks and nuances of operation should feel remarkably similar or remarkably bad. sometimes it's a matter of taste

Here's a demonstration of some of the features: https://youtu.be/TUeniA9BZcc

right now you can

• handwrite, highlight, color palette, size sliders
• erase, two modes, size slider
• lasso, compatible with side button; move the selection, delete it, copy/paste it across notes (resize and rotate coming soon)
• insert space tool
• undo/redo ink + text
• draw + pan with the mouse if you want
• write on pdfs
• flatten ink for pdf export
• snip pdfs

features

• data yours forever
  • your ink is all stored here: your vault's .handwriting/ folder
  • https://imgur.com/a/60GBWnn
• pressure sensitivity
• palm rejection
• pen toolbar with auto-hide
• pinch to zoom
• ink prediction + smoothing
• lined and grid paper background
• export ink as svg or pdf
• infinite canvas
• ink embeds
• handwriting to shape

works on

windows

macos

linux

ios

boox

android

installing

method 1

it's in the community plugin directory:

1. Settings
2. Community plugins
3. Browse
4. search Handwriting
5. Install and enable

method 2

can also just get it here:

https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/handwriting

method 3

if you want beta builds before they're released, use BRAT:

open your Obsidian vault > Settings > community plugins in left side bar

turn ON community plugins > browse

search for BRAT > hit install and enable > click Settings >

Scroll down till you see this and hit the plus in upper right hand

paste this in : ellimist-afk/handwriting > hit add plugin

required

Obsidian 1.12.3 or newer. please send reports.

ipad notes

• turn off Scribble or ios will draw its own black ink over your strokes and scratch-out deletes ink
• iPad Settings > Apple Pencil > Scribble > Toggle off

obsidian sync notes

• .handwriting/ is hidden and about half of all sync tools don't carry hidden folders by default (Obsidian Sync, iCloud, and probably Dropbox don't)
• if you use one of these services, turn on Compatibility with Obsidian Sync in the Handwriting settings panel to get your ink syncing across devices

how to use

tap any tool in the toolbar to use it: pen, highlighter, eraser, lasso, insert space, pan. hover to see the slider.

(mouse users only) run Handwriting: Mouse to activate the toolbar, or go into settings and set Pen toolbar's dropdown menu to Show. once it's up, click any tool and the mouse picks it up; click the tool you're using again and the mouse goes back to your cursor.

eraser modes

the eraser can erase whole strokes or just at the eraser reticle. switch between the two by tapping the eraser button and choosing either stroke or reticle. default erases whole strokes. Eraser: toggle toggles the eraser on and off, Eraser size: next cycles the reticle size.

color palette

click the palette button and a 4-wide grid palette drops down. pick from 8 pen colors or 5 highlighter colors. tap one to pick it or run Ink color: next to cycle them from the keyboard.

Pen color: next and Highlighter color: next cycle through their respective colors. as a workaround for not having favorites, you can try binding a hotkey to a color or size.

palm rejection

pdfs: a single touch too wide to be a fingertip gets trashed. heel of the hand reports a bigger contact than fingertip so we measure contact shape instead.

notes: we use a different, timing-based rejection.

pinch zoom

pinch to zoom works on notes and pdfs. the point you start the pinch on stays under your fingers instead of drifting while you zoom.

shape snap

hold the pen still for about a third of a second at the end of a stroke and it redraws as a line, triangle, rectangle, circle or ellipse.

update notice

the first time you open Obsidian after an update a small notice in the corner shows the changelog. it goes away on its own or click it to dismiss it sooner.

how it works

this is a section dedicated to anyone curious about the mechanisms

writing

when you put pen to screen, you are writing on an overlay drawn over the Obsidian text editor - this overlay is drawn in codemirror 6

the overlay claims pen input only, by default - touch, typing, selection and caret placement fall through to Obsidian untouched, and so does mouse unless mouse ink is turned on

in terms of risk, the only thing ever written directly by Handwriting is one line - handwriting-page-id, added to the invisible frontmatter of your note on the first detected stroke.

why the ink looks good

a typical pen reports ~200-250 dots/events a second. what other handwriting apps probably do (almost certainly) is draw straight lines between each dot - this is what causes the jaggedness or spikiness on boox or other e-ink devices, also because the pen trembles a bit naturally

what i did is smooth the curve by adding the previous dot into the calculation. this causes bad perceived lag, so i had to replace the last stretch of the curve to the pen tip with a straight line in real time

where is ink stored

your ink is one json file per note in /.handwriting/

(your vault)/.handwriting/

sidecar is a digital photography term that refers to a small file besides a main file, that holds information about the main file. this is a useful analogy

in this case, the sidecar stores your ink as coordinates - your note is linked to your ink by a single properties line in the properties field of your note. this link + the coordinates tells Obsidian where all the ink is

what this means practically is that no matter what happens to the ink, the text in your note will be safe, as the note itself is not modified (besides its frontmatter).

where does ink go when deleted

you can use undo (ctrl+z) to get ink back if you accidentally erase/delete it

undo/redo history is bulletproof - should undo/redo actions, erase, strokes, text, in the exact order you did them (this took quite a bit of effort actually).

Delete all ink copies the note's ink to .handwriting/trash/ before it wipes anything, every time. so even the big red button is recoverable.

in one case your ink will be permanently gone - if you delete the .handwriting folder itself.

if that was an accident (fat-fingered it, cat walked across the keyboard) check your OS recycle bin or trash first.

that being said, it's just good rule of thumb to always back up your vault!!

you can export your ink as svg or pdf first if you want to load it into other programs.

how is the ink stored

ink is stored in note-surface JSON coordinates. origin at the top-left of the text column, y absolute down the document. markdown reflows wherever it wants. your ink stays where you put it. editing text will never move ink except in the case of the insert space tool, by design

how is the ink placed

ink flows or drawing happens on raw pointer events. the line behind the nib is smoothed with math; the last stub to the pen tip is raw so the ink will always reach the tip of the pen

if you have any more questions i'd be glad to answer in the comments

reporting problems

open an issue. report what happened. remember to include which device and pen please.

EZMODE reporting:

run Bug report: record.

reproduce the bug.

run Bug report: send.

press Upload and the report comes straight to me 🙂 paste the id it gives you into your issue or the reddit thread.

for those of you nervous about bug reports: specifically what the report records are pen coordinates, timing, and what kind of device+pen the report is coming from- nothing else. furthermore, nothing leaves your device unless you press Upload. Copy and Save to Vault are offline ways to do bug reports

coming soon

• audio alongside ink
• ruler + compass on screen
• laser pointer
• ocr / handwriting to text
• searchable handwriting
• handwriting to math/latex
• text boxes
• canvas mode
• custom toolbar with favorites
• more custom colors

there's still a long way to go before obsidian has real parity with onenote. i'm not going anywhere.

money

Handwriting is free. i'm still working on it almost every night. if you want to buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/ellimistafk

thank you for using my plugin.

license

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

disclaimer: ai assistance was used in this project.