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>
Stage six. What you write goes into the note's ordinary content, so it is
encrypted, versioned, linkable and searchable like any other note — a PDF
note is a note with a document attached, not a separate kind of thing.
The panel is composed from the editor pieces rather than reusing
NoteEditor, which carries a whole drawing mode with its own canvas, tools
and undo stack. The PDF already has a drawing layer; a second one behind
the panel would be two places to draw with one of them invisible.
Side by side on a wide screen, two tabs on a narrow one, and either half
can be hidden — the second of the two toggles asked for. Reading the
original without one's own marks in the way is a normal thing to want.
The suite caught a real defect while checking this. A PDF note has two
sources of searchable text — what the reader typed and what the document
says — written at different moments by different code, both calling
setEntry. Whichever ran last was the only searchable half: typing a note
dropped the document's text, and reopening the document dropped the note.
The index now holds the two apart and replaces only the half it is given,
with six unit tests covering each direction, plus the snippet falling back
to the document so a hit inside a PDF still shows its sentence.
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>
