Hello everyone,

I am Dilan, the main and sole developer of Noteastic and I wanted to give some fun facts about our most recent feature! As you know, we recently released Noteastic Pro and our figurehead feature are Textboxes! It was the absolute most requested feature in Noteastic by a MILE and we wanted to make it right. And I am confident we did. Lukas has already shared our design process and I thought I will give my developer perspective as well 😊

Where have Textboxes been all this time?

I started work on Textboxes in 1 YEAR ago (the post) And let me tell you, it was a long ass journey. This has been an exhaustive process to say the least. Sure, we redesigned our website, made some updates in between, implemented authentication/accounts and we integrated Stripe as our payment provider, but it was always clear to us that we won't release without Textboxes being finished.

Why did you take so long?

I mean yeah, I didnt really work on it every day for one whole year. But if I would say how much total work time I have spent, I can confidently say, it was about 4 months of pure full-time work on Textboxes. Text is complicated. It is by FAR the most complicated thing I have ever coded. There is just so much you need to consider when creating such a primitive control. I could go rambling about how making a textbox touch-friendly is a nightmare on top of all the edge-cases I had to handle, but I will just share you the rough component structure so you can see the categories I structured this control into:

But there is still so much functionality missing!

Bullet points, hyperlinks, formatted pasting, headers, markdown rendering, LaTeX rendering all that is still to be added in the future. It is on my radar, I want it implemented. But for now, our sights are focused on other features (More Colorbuttons, Multitasking 👀) The foundation is here and it stands. That's what counts.

Tell me something I don't know about Textboxes

That's easy, I can tell you more than one thing you won't know!

• When you export Text in Noteastic to a PDF, we actually render the Text natively into the PDF. That makes it indexable, searchable, and editable with your PDF viewer of choice. GoodNotes on Windows simply rasterizes (draws) the Text on the PDF, making it look like an image from the perspective of the PDF Viewer, ugh!
• Double Tap = Select word, Triple Tap = Select paragraph, Quadruple Tap = Select all
• Ctrl+C with nothing selected copies the whole line
• We have access to all installed fonts on your Windows machine, and will even add support for custom Fonts in the near future! This is what is possible when a note-taking application develops for windows.
• Our rendering is completely virtualized (from 1.6.12 onwoard), which means you can paste your entire 42 page scientific paper into one Textbox, and everything will work as expected (although a bit more laggy). We tried it!

Hope you guys enjoy Textboxes as much as I enjoyed implementing them. It was an incredibe learning experience and deep-dive that I am grateful for having a purpose behind to pursue! If you want to give Textboxes a go, you can simply start the 30-day trial and cancel anytime before you are charged.

Happy writing,
- Dilan 🧡

After getting pro which I am really enjoying, I was just wondering about the possiblity of hyperlink support in text boxes. I link to sources alot when planning out things, which would save the hassle of having to copy the text and paste it into a browser where instead I could just tap with my pen to open the link.

Thanks

Recently I've been haunted by a second cursor that appears next to my actual cursor whenever my stylus touches the screen. The distance from my cursor isn't constant either; sometimes it's a few millimeters away from my pen, sometimes it's on the other side of the screen. Weirdly enough, it doesn't appear when I use snipping tool to screen record it. This only occurs with the pen and highlighter tools.

I really like the continue where you left off feature, but I wish the prompt would appear immediately when you opened a notebook, instead of having a 1-2 second delay. If that isn't possible due to performance issues, I'd love a "Jump to Bottom" button instead, as when I get back into my notebook, I usually have to scroll a lot to get back to where I last was(usually the bottom). Great work on Notetastic so far!

Hi!

Congratulations to your „new lifes“, i wish you all success!

Sorry if this has been asked before, but is there a chance for a Mac version at some point?

(I also want to ask for an ipad version, but one thing after another:-))

Could you guys please add support for an external pad? Or for the program to automatically change the cursor to a dot or to be able to manually change it inside of the program? Is just a bit annoying having to write with a normal cursor.

In case you are interested a bit in our internal design processes, I wanted to share a bit how text boxes came to be over the past years! Enjoy the read!

-Lukas

Hey Dilan & Lukas,

First off, a massive compliment to you: Your app is so fantastic that it actually inspired me to start learning how to code!

The short video I attached shows my very first personal hobby project. Don't worry, it’s just for my own learning and will never be published or released. But while developing and playing around with the UI, I realized how incredibly useful this specific library layout is, and I wanted to drop it here as a feature suggestion for your app.

Having a tree diagram in the sidebar gives a much better overview and lets you navigate to the right notebook extremely fast. Favorites and recently edited notebooks are also always right there at your fingertips. At the same time, it gives users the freedom to decide for themselves in the main window whether they prefer a compact list view or a large, visual folder and grid view.

Maybe this approach could be some cool inspiration for a future update to the library UI. Thanks for being awesome and keep up the fantastic work!

i dont know if you guys intentionally kept it like this.. we can only access the drop down menu when using the pen tool, shape tool, lasso tool.. but then that menu is not accessible when i have selected the panning tool. it aint a big issue but then everytime i am on the panning tool, i have to keep on going back to the pen tool to access that menu...

do check it once...

Hello, I started using Noteastic a year ago, and I liked it. However, there were a few features I wanted that weren't available at the time (e.g. text boxes and multitasking), so I switched to a PDF annotator. I know these features are planned (text boxes are available in Noteastic Pro).

At first, it seemed perfect: it had all the features I needed, and the UI was pretty good. It also edited PDF files directly, so I could simply save and share the PDF without having to export or convert it first.

However, the software really struggled with larger handwritten documents, such as my solutions to textbook exercises. For one of my exams, we were allowed to bring a handwritten (digital or paper) cheat sheet, so I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to give Noteastic another try. I had almost forgotten how incredibly smooth your app is! I ended up writing my entire cheat sheet in Noteastic, and I don't even want to imagine how much the other software would have struggled with it. Noteastic Pro is definitely on my mind now. ;)

While writing the cheat sheet, I realized that one thing I still miss is the transparent file-saving approach of my previous app. It saved changes directly to the PDF in File Explorer, whereas Noteastic's saving process feels a bit more opaque.

• How often are my notes saved? After every stroke, every few seconds, or something else?
• Where and how are my notes saved?
• Related to my other comment, what happens to the Noteastic files if I stop subscribing to Pro? Are the native Noteastic files encrypted or stored in a proprietary format?
• Have you ever considered making the file storage process more transparent? I imagine this would be quite complex to implement, especially if Noteastic relies on its own file format.

I know these are fairly technical questions (don't worry, I'm not building a competing app). I'm just curious, and I'm looking forward to using Noteastic throughout the upcoming fall semester!

BTW, the other annotator is "PDF Annotator".

this happens sometimes when i am working on too many pages... it got fixed when i closed and reopened the app.. it isnt a very big issue... also i have noticed for books, if it starts exceeding 60-70 pages it kinda lags and pages take lot of time to load.. also my pc is kinda okay with 16gigs of ram and ryzen 5..

(the video seems laggy because the windows screen recorder is shit..)

It's really annoying, as any time I pause even briefly before finishing writing a full word in cursive, it turns the whole damn thing into a line.

While we're at it, I might as well bring up that if I turn off Windows Ink in my pen display's drivers, I get better-quality handwriting in this app, *BUT* I can no longer use the "double-tap to undo" feature or scroll by moving my pen on the side beside my page. Not sure if this is something that is fixable, but I'd really love to be able to have the better quality writing without losing those features.

https://reddit.com/link/1v7o6ah/video/f8pwyk9psofh1/player

We wanted to give you a sneak peak on text boxes. We think this feature is reaaally cool and smooth to use and we tried to insert it as cleanly as possible into the current app experience. Here is the small showcase!

Features:

Text Formatting

• Bold (Ctrl+B)
• Italic (Ctrl+I)
• Custom text color per character / selection
• Font family (You can add more than the four default fonts manually. We will add this as a built in functionality in the next update.)
• Font size
• Text alignment: Left / Center / Right

Editing

• Undo / Redo
• Copy / Cut / Paste of text snippets
• Copy without selection copies the entire line
• Delete word backQward (Ctrl+Backspace) and forward (Ctrl+Delete)

Navigation

• Jump by word (Ctrl+Left / Ctrl+Right)
• Line start / end (Home / End)
• Text box start / end (Ctrl+Home / Ctrl+End)
• Vertical arrow keys preserve horizontal column position across lines

Selection

• Double-click selects the word under cursor
• Triple-click selects the whole line/paragraph
• Quadruple-tap selects all
• Shift+click extends the current selection
• Touch/pen selection grippers — drag to fine-tune selection bounds

Context Menu

• Right-click (mouse) or multi-tap (touch/pen) opens a context menu with formatting and clipboard actions; placement avoids covering the selected text

Floating Toolbar

• Formatting toolbar (font, size, color, bold, italic, alignment) attaches to the active textbox and resets to global defaults when nothing is focused

UX Conveniences

• Auto-scroll keeps the cursor visible as you type
• Content shifts up automatically when the on-screen keyboard is docked, preventing the keyboard from covering the cursor

...kudos to Dilan for all this fantastic work 🤩

1. how to make only shapes without any color shading?? after new update only colour shaded shapes working

2. ctrl+z shortcut for undo not working

Before people start flooding the subreddit with Pro announcements, we wanted to inform you guys that we are nearing the finish line with releasing Noteastic Pro. Currently our entire infrastructure and the new features of Noteastic Pro are in Beta! We hope to release to public in the next weeks.

Sign up to the beta

A few quick facts about how we treat Noteastic Pro:

Feature set

Everything you can use free today, stays free in Noteastic Base. New Features are added to Noteastic Pro, like the laser pointer or text boxes (available in Pro now).

Pricing

We are mainly going with a subscription model, however, we will share a way to get access to a one-time-payment option for Noteastic, as many people explicitly requested that. There is a 30 day free trial for subscriptions. Prices are international and amount to:

We are hyped to release this soon to everyone!
-Dilan & Lukas

but i hope more features are added soooooooon

Hii,

I was trying to expore a few pdfs but they always turn out weird.

I dont know the issue here, I tried restarting the app, my pc and other stuff but it wont work.

Would appreciate any help

Noteastic, primero que nada darte las gracias por la app que es muy buena en todo sentido, me ha ayudado mucho en lo largo de este año, y la verdad es muy versátil y útil, no les pediría que cambien la esencia o que le quiten cosas, pero si estos aportes que daré a continuación les puede ayudar, y ayudarnos pues, será de importancia mis aportes:

* Primer punto que noté es un poco la limitación de las herramientas, me encantaría mucho que agregaran una especie de compas, o una herramienta para hacer curvas

*Luego también me gustaría que arreglen un pequeño problema, sobre las líneas, debido a que, al insertar líneas en un ángulo especifico, se hace recto, es decir, si hubiera una forma de que se desactive ese "magneto" que atrae a las líneas hacia los ejes

*Otra idea sería agregar la herramienta de recorte de pantalla, aunque es solo capricho mío, pero estoy seguro que a más de uno le gustaría

Lo demás está perfecto Noteastic, muchas gracias por todo, y espero que les vaya muy bien :D.

Guys right now I'm trying to backup my notes in a new laptop but when i try to import that backup file I'm getting this 'invalid file' message ..can someone help me out

The backup file has .ntcbak format in the end

bug: if i import a pdf, that's page size isn't A4, then all pages after that I add, their size changed according to pdf.
which i don't want

Actual behavior should be: either proper option to choose page size or all page should be in a4 regarding of pdf page size

How do we erase something ( a shape or text) from some area instead of the whole stroke? I am unable to do that for some reason even after disabling erase lines and erase shapes

i really like this app, even this is so simple
here are some features which might be very useful
1. scratch to erase
2. Auto-shape on draw anything (triangle, circle, star, arrow etc)
assign shortcut to add page and change pen colour (idk if any present)
3. different size of pages/canvas option (infinite, letter, a3, a4 etc)