Wournal

Wournal is an app that is probably best described as "digital paper". You can freely put your handwriting, text, images and vector graphics on a canvas that is about as easy to use as paper, freeing up your brain to focus on the subject matter.

• Can be used to annotate PDF documents
• Supports Windows and GNU/Linux. (Android support is planned, MacOS/iOS open to contribution)
• Save single-page documents as SVG to interoperate with other software.
• Respect system dark/light mode.

Current Project Status

Wournal is currently still considered alpha software. While that means that there may still be some bugs creeping around, it should be mostly stable.

The plan is to first create an Android version and to wait a while for bug reports before releasing it as beta. The Android release will require a somewhat significant rewrite of many UI components, so the look and feel will change quite a bit when that happens.

Lineage and Thanks

Wournal is primarily inspired by the wonderful Xournal and can therefore be seen as part of a whole lineage of programs written over the years like the venerable Microsoft Windows Journal, Jarnal or the more modern Xournal++ and MrWriter.

In addition to all developers of these programs, ConnorsFan on StackOverflow also deserves a big thank your for the initial basic template for the line smoothing algorithm.

Why write this when X exists?

Most of the programs in the lineage of Wournal have not been maintained for a long time, with three exceptions:

• Xournal++ is written for GTK in C++. This has some advantages, but it also introduces a number of issues. Porting to Android/iOS is impossible, development and debugging production builds can be quite intimidating and subtle differences in behaviour can and do cause instability on Windows. Additionally, embedding a web app like Wournal can be done in many more environments then a native app like Xournal++. Xournal++ is a wonderful project that deserves a lot of respect for pushing FOSS note taking software, but it does have some limitations that make it deserving of competition.

• PDF Annotator is a proprietary Windows-only application (probably written in .NET). It slows down significantly with documents containing a decent amount of handwriting. And it can be a bit expensive for a casual note taker or broke student.

• MrWriter is written for Qt in C++, which means it inherits some of the issues mentioned for Xournal++. It is in a similar state of development as Wournal, but it struggles with performance on Windows.

There are likely some competitors that are not mentioned here. If you feel some program is missing here, feel free to expand this section!

Development

Wournal is a mostly relatively normal electron app, except that it uses mvui as a frontend framework. I know, I know, we really need more javascript frameworks, but there were some good reasons to choose it, mainly that a tiny framework like mvui means that Wournal should be easily maintainable long into the future... and it was also kind of fun. You should really not be scared to contribute because of this, you can reproduce most common React patterns in mvui.

git clone https://github.com/dominiksta/wournal/
npm i
npm run dev

Building

Building for Windows on GNU/Linux is possible by installing wine and mono. On Ubuntu, installing wine64 and mono-complete speifically should work. Building for GNU/Linux on Windows can be achieved through WSL2. See the Electron Forge documentation for details.

npm run package # build binary for current os

npm run make # build distributables for current os

# for building windows on linux/wsl (ubuntu 22.04 lts specifically)
sudo apt install wine64 mono-complete
npm run make -- --platform=win32 --targets=zip
# the `wix` target can only be built on a real windows machine