Stage seven, and the last of the PDF work. A PDF note now offers the
document with your marks stamped in, the untouched original, or just the
notes written beside it.
pdf.js only reads, so writing needs pdf-lib — behind a dynamic import
like pdf.js, so the bundle everyone downloads carries no PDF writer for
the sake of people who never export one. Main bundle grew 6 kB; the
180 kB writer arrives only when used.
The coordinate decision from stage four is what makes this a translation
rather than a reconstruction: strokes were stored in page points from the
start, the only space a PDF understands, so nothing has to be guessed
back from screen pixels. Only the origin moves, PDF putting it at the
bottom-left.
The stored file is never modified — pdf-lib builds a new document — so a
clean copy stays available however often it has been drawn on. The suite
re-fetches the stored bytes after exporting and compares them, and checks
the plain export is byte-identical to what was imported.
Eraser strokes are dropped. On screen they remove ink by drawing in
destination-out; a PDF content stream has no equivalent, and stamping
them would put grey scribbles exactly where something had been rubbed
out.
The suite renders both files with pdf.js and counts dark pixels, 1633
against 2557. A larger file only proves bytes were added; this proves ink
can be seen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stage three: the viewer. Drawing on pages comes next.
pdf.js stays out of the bundle everyone downloads — it is larger than the
rest of the application put together, so it is behind a dynamic import and
a session that never opens a PDF never fetches it. Main bundle grew by
8 kB for the viewer shell; the 162 kB library arrives only when needed.
The worker is bundled rather than pulled from a CDN, because a viewer
that stops working during someone else's outage is not one you can rely
on offline.
Two things that only showed up once it ran in a browser:
- pdf.js 6 calls Uint8Array.prototype.toHex, which only very recent
browsers have. Anything older failed with "n.toHex is not a function",
which says nothing about the cause. Now on the legacy build, which
compiles those away — a little larger, and the difference between
working everywhere and working on this year's browsers.
- nginx has no MIME type for .mjs and served the worker as
octet-stream, which a browser refuses to run as a module.
Pages are laid out at their true proportions before anything is drawn, so
the scrollbar is honest immediately and a document mixing portrait and
landscape keeps both — the first version scaled every page to the widest
one, which the suite caught by checking the two aspect ratios differ.
Bytes come from the authenticated attachment route and are cached in
IndexedDB. Content-addressed storage means a cached copy can never be
stale, so a document opened once needs no connection again. Verified with
the network switched off.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The app is meant to run in daily private use now, so this pass was mostly
about the ways it could quietly lose data.
Reliability and security:
- the server no longer invents a JWT_SECRET or ENCRYPTION_KEY when one is
missing; it refuses to start. The old fallback silently made every stored
note unreadable after a restart.
- notes are encrypted with AES-256-GCM (v2:); existing CBC bodies still read.
- login is rate limited and compares against a dummy hash when the user does
not exist, so timing does not reveal who is registered.
- a server response issued before a local save is never adopted. This had
already eaten drawing strokes and note links; sync.hasPendingWrites() now
guards every path that takes a body from the server.
Editor and features:
- TipTap replaces the contenteditable editor: tables, task lists, and links
to other notes and notebooks, with a backlinks bar on the target.
- content format v2 ({v:2,doc}); v1 {html,tasks} bodies migrate on open.
- version history: the state before each write is snapshotted, coalesced
into 5-minute windows, 50 versions or 90 days per note.
- full-text search runs in the client, because the server cannot read
encrypted bodies and a server index would defeat the encryption.
- image attachments are stored by SHA-256 and deduplicated; the client
fetches them authenticated and caches the blob, so they work offline.
- drawings are vector strokes in a fixed 1200x1600 page space and now look
the same on every screen (0.0-0.2% deviation across four widths).
- login is by username; existing email accounts migrate automatically.
Operations:
- data lives on host bind mounts, not Docker volumes, so Proxmox Backup
covers it. Back up .env with it — without ENCRYPTION_KEY the dump is
unreadable.
Structure:
- NoteApp.jsx is gone. App.jsx now holds only where the user is; note data,
search, layout, history and drag each live behind a hook, and the four
panes are stateless.
- the whole data layer is TypeScript, with 81 unit tests concentrated on
the places that have actually broken.
- fixed along the way: the browser back button had a dead press, because
restoring a history entry pushed a duplicate one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
