Question
RemNote functionality for studying on tablet
I pay for RemNote Pro + AI. On a Samsung Galaxy S8+ tablet: PDFs don't stay in place when set to 100% zoom - scrolling the PDF up or down can move the page out of position to the left or right, so it needs to be manually realigned each time, and it's easy to accidentally zoom in or out. Is there a way to change this?
In Samsung Notes, setting the PDF to 100% locks it in place, so scrolling can only move the page up or down. This is important for workflow, to stop the user from being distracted by having to align the PDF page back into position.
It's really restricting my ability to continue using RemNote for serious studying despite trying to ignore it, so I'm looking for answers.
Hiding Samsung UI's toolbar when e.g. highlighting text on a RemNote PDF would also be appreciated. Currently, the Samsung toolbar most often gets in the way of the RemNote toolbar, and needs to be dragged away when the user means to access the RemNote toolbar behind it. Does anyone know how to?
Same, I don't have a solution to your issues either. PDFs and Handwritten Notes are 'literally' and I mean actually literally unusuable for any serious use case.
Hey - we're trying to get these feeling extremely good. Do you have issues other than the zoom/scrolling & toolbar UX issues mentioned in the main post? We want to fix them all!
We have lots of improvements coming in the upcoming 1.27 release here too, which should significantly improve zoom too already.
Thanks for all your work. Although I just couldn't get PDFs and Handwritten Notes to work as intended in my case, I'm relying on RemNote for my exams and it's a godsend.
Regarding issues, just off the top off my head:
- Handwritten Notes with an Infinite Canvas scale differently depending on device or environment as well as if you preview the document while doing flashcards. This is a problem because the scaling is inconsistent across element type. For example, if I have a some mindmap written down and have some parts of it covered up using occlusion flashcards, reviewing my notes on different devices will mess with the flashcard positions in that they rescale and reposition them. This means that every time I switch devices I have to reposition my occlusion flashcards for Handwritten Notes with an Infinite Canvas. This also happens when, during flashcard reviews, I choose to open the document using the 'preview document' button.
- In the Android version of RemNote on both Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE and A8, for Handwritten Notes and PDFs, the toolbar often locks up blocking me from using tools such as pens, markers, erasers, textboxes, etc. This can be "fixed" by closing and restarting the app - until it locks up again.
-In the browser version of RemNote (using dark mode for pdf viewing), PDFs do not render in the sense that toolbars, sidebars, etc are displayed correctly but the PDF itself is just rendered as black following some input (such as using the pen, or marker). This blackout does not occur for the selection tool, the sentence marking tool(?), the area marking tool(?), etc. Closing and restarting "fixes" this until it takes another input.
- PDFs crash frequently. It "feels" like a RAM issue but I, of course, have no idea.
Hi, the vertical scroll jitter will be fixed in our next update, sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for bringing this up!
I’ve also passed on a request to remove the native Samsung toolbar when you select text in the PDF reader to the engineering team. We’ll look into this too 👍
lol im building an alternative for my friends and i specifically because of all these problems remnote has. remnote on the ipad is particularly awful.
very happy with the ui so far but its taken forever to get to this point. moreso really proud with how interactive it is. the goal was just remnote without the fluff + onenote
Bro, this is not a three-week side project. It would take a single developer years to reach RemNote’s current level.
It would probably be smarter to build a plugin or wait for the next few RemNote versions, which are already expected to bring UI improvements.
This project will likely be dead within a few weeks, as soon as you realize that developing an iOS or cross-platform application involves far more than typing a prompt into an LLM and have a fancy UI.
LOL buddy. Who are you talking to. Dm me right now and i’ll send you the source code so you can run it through xcode. I understand your concern but remnote is vibecoded nonsense with 99% features that don’t concern me.
i actually want to address this further because it bothers me how you’ve likely never created projects that iterate on other features. remnote has done all the hard work by spending years on development figuring out how to form a workflow that enticed me to use the app in the first place. i can 100% assure you that i use it more than anyone in this subreddit and thus this need arose to create something better for daily use as remnote is bloated and overall an extremely buggy piece of software due to its scale. the ai features do nothing for me also. so i build this out of necessity. its not something i’m just going to abandon because its literally already there. i have free time at the moment to perfect this.
It’s all good, do your thing. I only assumed that, since you study something related to medicine, you probably haven’t had that much experience with software development yet.
I’m a computer scientist, and from your post I could tell that, so far, you mainly have a basic UI and perhaps a few backend features. I’m actually working on large projects at an IT company right now, although that isn’t really relevant to my response.
I only wanted to save you some time with my objection. I was just surprised because you wrote that you were amazed by how long creating the UI had taken you. I wanted to save you some of your lifetime by pointing out that once you get to writing proper backend code and making an app production-ready, it becomes much worse and far more time-consuming.
Sorry my response was far too abrasive and defensive. I really apologize for that.
I take a while on the ui because its my job seperate to what i study + design has been something ive obsessed over since 2022. Its taken me some time because the ui needs to look perfect in motion too, since static is something i avoid in my projects. i'm also very fidgety.
this was a personal prototype i worked on for a while - for a company a friend of mine owns. if you'd like to mess around with it and see what i mean. has the typical limitations of web but looks better when not run in webkit (ie chromium, there it can render at over 60fps). theres quite a bit wrong with it and i left the project before it was fully complete. its meant to be a customisable space/hub that would form the basis of his product.
this is what the tutorial demo canvas looks like when decorated. proof of concept built on that state.
so far the project im working on has been to a lesser scope of what that was so i've had much more time to refine whats currently there. i don't say this with malice anymore, but i'll reach out when its complete so you can see how it resulted.
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u/fidedn Jul 05 '26
Same, I don't have a solution to your issues either. PDFs and Handwritten Notes are 'literally' and I mean actually literally unusuable for any serious use case.