The panel beside a PDF is for notes about the document; a note that belongs to
one paragraph is a different thing, and one that has to begin "on page 14, third
paragraph" has already lost its place. Click Randnotiz, click the passage, write.
Pins ride in the same per-page overlay as the drawings, in PDF points, so one
stays on its sentence at every zoom and in the exported file. Living outside the
note body has consequences that each needed handling: nothing else would index
them for search, so the viewer feeds them in with their page numbers; clearing a
page's ink must not take them; and "is this overlay empty?" was answered by
counting strokes — in the client *and* independently in the server, so an
overlay holding only pinned notes was stored as NULL and lost every note on it.
They are stamped into the annotated export as a numbered marker plus a box of
text, on whichever side of the pin has room. Standard PDF fonts are Latin-1, so
characters outside it are replaced rather than failing the whole export.
The Notizen control moves into the viewer's toolbar. A second row for one button
cost reading height on every screen and put one of the document's controls
somewhere none of the others were. On a phone, where the viewer is not on screen
while the notes are, the way back sits in the panel.
Renaming a separator no longer shifts the row: the two rules always share what is
left over equally and the middle keeps one width in both states.
215 unit tests, 206 browser checks across eleven suites.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The paper measurably shrank on switching to Draw — 733px to 460px on the same
screen. The editor was a flex item at its default `flex: 0 1 auto`, so its width
was its widest row's: the toolbar. Swapping a dozen formatting buttons for six
drawing ones collapsed it. It now fills the pane, so the width is a property of
the window.
Each notebook remembers how its notes are ordered, on the server rather than per
device. The manual order has to survive being looked away from, so `reindex`
renumbers every note in the notebook rather than the filtered view, and dragging
is switched off while a search narrows the list. Reordering has its own route:
`PUT /notes/:id` would bump `updated_at` and snapshot a version, so a drag would
move a note to the top of "last changed" and spend a slot of its history.
Markdown and our own ZIP archives come back as notes, with their images
re-uploaded as attachments. A drawing returns as the PNG it was exported as —
vectors are not recoverable from pixels — and the import says so rather than
leaving it to be discovered. Writing the parser turned up a real bug in the
exporter: blocks were emitted with no blank line between them, so a list after a
list became one list and a quote after an item was read as part of it.
Creating or importing from "All Notes" now asks which notebook instead of
silently taking the first one. The web-link prompt is a real dialog: a bare
domain becomes https, javascript: is refused with a reason. The PDF viewer's
hide-drawing control is a labelled button rather than a filled-or-hollow dot,
and the export icon points down into a tray like every other download.
186 unit tests, 179 browser checks across eleven suites, including a new
`offline` suite that loads the app cold with the network off.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two rules governed version retention: the newest 50 per note, and a sweep
of anything past 90 days. The second was wrong. The count already bounds
what a note can accumulate, so age only ever deleted history nothing had
replaced — and it bit hardest exactly where history is most wanted, a
note left alone for a quarter of a year losing its whole past for having
done nothing. It is off unless VERSION_RETENTION_DAYS is set.
How many versions to keep is now a notebook's own setting, falling back
to the server default when left empty. A reference notebook can keep
fifty of everything while a scratch one keeps three.
That makes freeing attachments answerable. A picture taken out of a note
cannot be deleted straight away: the versions from before still show it,
and restoring one would find a hole. It is released once no current note
and no kept version refers to it — which, with retention by count, is
when the last version holding it is pushed out.
The server cannot look for itself, bodies being encrypted, so the client
reports a note's attachments on every save as it already does for links,
and a version inherits what the note held when it was snapshotted — by
definition what that version contains.
Two things make it safe rather than merely plausible. Silence is not
"uses nothing": a note written before this existed has no rows, which
looks identical to one with no pictures, so nothing is released for a
user while any of their notes has yet to report — the prefetch that fills
the search index reports for them on its first pass. And an upload has a
row before the note using it does, so recent attachments are left alone.
POST /api/admin/housekeeping runs the sweep on demand.
Caught while testing: the same block of markup had been pasted into the
create-notebook dialog as well, where the state it referenced did not
exist — the dialog crashed on open.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
This is a private instance, so anyone able to reach the login page could
previously give themselves an account. The registration route is gone
rather than hidden, and the login screen no longer hints that accounts
can be made.
Accounts now come from an admin under Account → Administration: create,
delete, and reset a password. Appointing further admins is deliberately
not offered — with one admin it is not needed, and it is the one power
that turns a compromised account into a lost instance.
The first admin comes from INKNOTE_ADMIN_USER / INKNOTE_ADMIN_PASSWORD,
used only when the database has no users, or to choose whom to promote
when an older database has users but no admin. Once an admin exists both
are ignored, so leaving them in .env cannot reset anything.
Two things that would otherwise have been quietly wrong:
- a deleted user's token stayed valid until it expired, because tokens
are signed rather than stored and there was no session to revoke.
authMiddleware now checks the account still exists, so an open tab
stops working the moment the account is deleted.
- deleting an account takes its notes, notebooks, drawings and version
history with it via ON DELETE CASCADE. Verified: no orphaned rows in
notes, notebooks, sync_log, attachments or note_versions.
Deletion asks for the username to be typed back, since it destroys data
that version history cannot bring back.
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>
