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>
Two questions instead of one, because the answers depend on each other:
Markdown holds text only, a PNG holds the drawing only, PDF holds both.
Listing every format flat would have offered combinations that cannot
exist. A note without a drawing skips the first step rather than showing
it mostly greyed out.
While testing that, the drawings turned out never to have made it into
any export at all — not the ZIP, not the PDF. strokeDocOf() *builds* a
stroke document from a bare array, and it was being handed one that was
already a document, so the strokes ended up nested one level too deep and
every length check read undefined. Nothing complained; the export simply
came out without the drawing. It went unnoticed because the notes the
earlier suite exported had none.
Now uses docStrokes(), and the suite draws on a note before exporting it,
checks the PNG's magic bytes, and checks it is 159 KB rather than an empty
white page — a check on the file merely existing would have passed against
the broken version too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The reason to build this is not a missing feature — it is that trusting a
program you maintain alone with years of notes should not mean the notes
can only ever be read by that program.
Reachable from a note's toolbar, a notebook's context menu, and Account →
Alle Notizen exportieren.
Markdown carries over everything with an equivalent: headings, lists,
quotes, code, tables, and task state as `- [x]`. A link to another note in
the same export becomes a relative link to its file; a link to a note
outside it degrades to the plain title rather than leaving a dead
reference. Notes with images or a drawing arrive as a ZIP so the files
travel along, and a multi-note export gets a README index.
PDF goes through the browser's print dialog rather than a bundled PDF
library — the browser already has a good one, and it is the only format
where drawings sit inside the document. Markdown gets them as a PNG
beside the text, with a line saying so, because dropping them silently
would be the wrong kind of quiet.
Two decisions worth recording:
- the ZIP writer is eighty lines here rather than a dependency. Note text
is small and images are already compressed, so compression bought
nothing, and stored entries are a handful of fixed-layout records.
- Markdown escaping only covers what changes meaning mid-line, plus a
leading list or heading marker. Escaping every character Markdown ever
uses turns a sentence into `Hallo\. Alles gut\!`, which defeats the
point of choosing a readable format.
42 unit tests on the serialiser and the archive format, plus a browser
suite that unpacks a real download and reads the bytes back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
