Handwritten A4 Notebook

An Obsidian plugin for writing by hand on real pages highlighter, shapes, PDFs and a calculator, all saved as open JSON in your vault.

Try the live demo

Free and open source (MIT) · Desktop, tablets and phones · v3.16.1

Features

Everything a paper notebook can do, and more.

  • Pen, highlighter & eraser

    Pressure ink with opacity, a flat highlighter, and an eraser that cuts strokes.

  • Shapes

    Lines, arrows, rectangles and ellipses with dashes, fills and separate outline and fill colors.

  • Lasso selection

    Move, scale, rotate, recolor, group and lock, even onto another page.

  • Pages panel

    Thumbnails and sections: jump to, reorder, duplicate or restyle pages.

  • Page styles

    Portrait, landscape or endless; dots, lines, grid, Cornell, music staff and more.

  • Images & PDFs

    Paste, crop and rotate images; import a PDF and write on it.

  • Calculator & plots

    Scientific calculator with units and matrices; editable function plots.

  • Export & history

    PDF export with bookmarks, printing, and automatic version history.

  • Tablets & OLED care

    Palm rejection, pinch zoom, pen button, dark paper and burn-in protection.

Privacy

  • No network requests and no telemetry – PDF import uses the engine bundled with Obsidian.
  • Writes only your .hnote notes and their hidden data folders (PDF export to a folder you pick).
  • Notes are plain JSON; hnote2pdf.py turns them into PDFs without Obsidian.
  • This website has no cookies or analytics; the demo keeps its note only in your browser.

Install

1

Community plugins

Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search Handwritten A4 Notebook → Install → Enable.

Open in Obsidian
2

Beta via BRAT

Install the BRAT plugin → Add beta plugin → otho-dll/Obsidian-Handwriting

3

Manually

Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release into <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/handwritten-notebook/, then enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Getting started: right-click a folder in the file explorer → New handwritten note, or run the command Create new handwritten note. Fingers scroll and zoom, the pen draws, and everything saves automatically.