Notebook

Handwrite in Obsidian — like a real notebook, with your S Pen.

Pressure-sensitive ink, PDFs, equations and a beautiful library, saved as plain files in your vault.
Built first for Android tablets with a stylus, and at home on Windows too. Free, open source, local-first.

_{Already in Obsidian? Open obsidian://show-plugin?id=notebook from your browser, or search for Notebook in Settings → Community plugins → Browse.}

Gallery · Features · Quick start · FAQ · Live roadmap · Changelog

Why Notebook

Gallery

_{Home. Subject folders, the pages you edited last, statistics computed on your device, quick actions.}

_{Library. Filter chips, smart collections, frequent tags, recent and favourite notebooks with page thumbnails.}

_{Writing. The toolbar and the radial menu: undo, redo, width, colour and tools, one tap from the pen.}

Colour, at the pen. Twelve colours, a custom colour and an eyedropper, without leaving the page.	Shapes and tools. Lines, arrows, rectangles, ellipses and the ruler from the same dial.
New notebook. A generated cover, real paper previews, A4 · A5 · B5 · Letter · custom.	New folder. A subject with its own icon, colour and line art.

_{Settings. Organised by task, most-used options first, with search in English and Italian.}

_{Generated art. Four of the seven line-art families (contours, cells, waves, branches; also flow, orbits and grid), drawn on the device from a subject's name and colour.}

_{Screenshots are taken in the project's browser test harness (npm run harness:check) with a demo vault, not on a device.}

Features at a glance

The highlights are below; the complete guide, with every setting, is in docs/features.md.

Writing

Ink that feels like paper and stays sharp at any zoom, because every stroke is stored as vector points with pressure.

• Pen, a highlighter that darkens what is under it instead of covering it, and an eraser for whole strokes, segments or an outlined area.
• Lasso to move, resize and rotate; shapes that turn clean when you hold still at the end; text boxes, images, a ruler and stamps.
• Radial menu next to the pen, favourite pens, palm rejection, two- and three-finger taps for undo and redo.
• Equations typeset with Obsidian's maths engine and function graphs (cartesian, parametric, polar, implicit), both kept as vectors.
• Papers: blank, ruled, grid, dotted, millimetre, Cornell, music, isometric, hexagonal, planners, and infinite pages.

Study

Tools for lectures and revision, all computed on your device.

• Markers for gaps, questions, importance and homework (homework becomes Obsidian tasks), with an End of lecture panel.
• Invisible ink for answers and Redo the exercise: a practice copy with your ink hidden, a peek at the solution and a timer.
• Pen gestures: circle to select, scribble to delete, "^" to insert space, a star to bookmark.
• A class timetable that opens the right notebook on a new dated page, and New lecture from slides.
• A Zettelkasten made from handwriting: cards from a lasso selection or a page, with an inbox to process.

PDF

Annotate slides and papers without losing the clean original.

• Import a PDF as a notebook, insert PDF pages or a scan (camera, corner detection, document and whiteboard filters).
• Search the PDF text, a highlighter that snaps to text lines, hide your annotations or dim the page, widen margins to write beside a slide.
• Open a PDF side by side with your notes, and update to a new version of the slides while your notes stay on their slides.
• Anchored excerpts: cut a figure onto another page, then tap its badge to jump back to the exact place it came from.
• Export highlights and text boxes to a Markdown note.

Organisation

Find any page in seconds, even in a big vault.

• Home dashboard and a library with subject folders, smart collections (To study, Favourites, With PDF, Recent, Exams), tags, pins and an archive.
• Search across titles, tags and typed text (handwriting is not searched: there is no OCR).
• Pages panel with thumbnails, drag to reorder, a coloured outline of bookmarks, page tags and a Go to page switcher across notebooks.
• Export to PDF, SVG, PNG or Markdown with page images; print on desktop.

Obsidian integration

Notebooks behave like part of your vault.

• Link or embed a single page: [[Physics.notebook#p3]], ![[Physics.notebook#p3]] or a notebook code block; obsidian://notebook links for other apps.
• Optional companion notes so Obsidian search, the graph, tags and Dataview see your notebooks.
• Obsidian tags, Obsidian bookmarks to a page, commands for the mobile toolbar, a public API for Templater, QuickAdd and Dataview.
• A documented file format with a JSON Schema, so other tools can read notebooks.
• Interface in English and Italian.

Privacy & safety

Your notes are files you own, and the plugin works hard never to lose them.

• A .notebook file is versioned JSON in your vault; PDFs and images are stored once in _assets. No account, no cloud, no telemetry, no AI.
• Automatic saving plus an instant save journal that restores the last changes after a crash.
• Version history, Restore a single page, Repair damaged notebook. Unreadable files are never overwritten and a backup is kept.
• Sync safety for folder-sync apps: conflicted copies can be merged, an Open on another device banner, and an integrity check that spots stale copies.

Quick start

1. Install. In Obsidian open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for Notebook, then Install and Enable (or open the community page). Prefer the newest build, or a pre-release? Use BRAT.
2. Create your first notebook. Tap the ribbon icon to open Notebook home, then New notebook. The creation dialog has two tabs: Notebook (cover, name, folder, paper, page size and orientation) and Folder (a subject with its own icon and colour). Choose, then Create.
3. Write. The pen writes; one finger scrolls and two fingers zoom (turn on Draw with finger in the settings to write with a finger). Click the S Pen side button while the pen hovers, or hold the pen still for a moment, to open the radial menu; hold the button while you write to erase.
4. S Pen tips. What the side button can and cannot do inside Obsidian on Android, and how to map the pen's remote button to a key, is in S Pen on Android.
5. Sync. Notebooks are ordinary files: a Google Drive or OneDrive folder-sync app, Syncthing or Obsidian Sync (turn on Other types) all work. Sync the _assets and _backup folders too. Details in the FAQ and in Versions and recovery.

Install with BRAT

BRAT installs the latest GitHub release, pre-releases included, and keeps it updated:

1. Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for BRAT (Obsidian42 - BRAT), install and enable it.
2. Command palette → BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing → enter https://github.com/Plagemes/Obsidian-Notebook → choose the latest version → Add plugin.
3. Enable Notebook in Settings → Community plugins.

Manual install (Windows and Android) and debugging on Android are in docs/install.md.

FAQ

Roadmap

As of 0.30.0 the roadmap has 268 features shipped, 0 in progress and 170 to do (plus 5 deferred and 30 dropped). The live page is rebuilt from docs/roadmap.md on every change, with filters, search and the most requested features.

Contributing

• Want something? Request a feature, or 👍 an existing request: the roadmap page ranks them by votes. Loose ideas are welcome in Discussions → Ideas.
• Found a bug? Report it. Reports from Android tablets with a pen help most.
• Want to code? Read CONTRIBUTING.md and docs/development.md. Please follow the Code of Conduct; security issues go through SECURITY.md.

_{Status: v0.30.0 (document format 28), early development. The automated tests and the browser harness pass, but Notebook has not been verified on Android hardware yet; what is verified, and how to test it, is in docs/testing.md.}

Licence

MIT, see LICENSE. Third-party code: perfect-freehand (MIT). PDFs are rendered with the pdf.js that Obsidian provides. No code was copied from the other projects studied in docs/research.md.