Stage five. pdf.js draws pages as pictures, so selecting means laying
transparent spans over them exactly where each word was painted. The
layer carries the same scale as the canvas — they drift apart otherwise
and a selection lands on the wrong words. While drawing it stops taking
pointer events entirely, or a stroke would come out as a selection.
The text is also extracted and handed to the index that already holds the
notes, so one search box finds a sentence whether it was typed or
imported. Extraction runs after the document is on screen and yields
between pages: it must never stand between the reader and the first page.
The extracted text is deliberately not sent to the server. It is
derivable from a file the server already holds, so storing it again costs
space and a second thing to encrypt for nothing gained. The price, stated
plainly in the readme, is that a PDF becomes searchable on a device once
that device has opened it — the same shape as the limitation notes have.
Text runs are joined on pdf.js's hasEOL rather than concatenated. Without
it the last word of a line glues to the first of the next and matches
nothing when searched for.
The minimal text-layer CSS is written out rather than importing
pdfjs-dist/web/pdf_viewer.css, which carries the whole reference viewer's
toolbars and dialogs.
Suite now checks the layer sits over the page rather than stacked in a
corner, that the text is transparent, that dragging selects real words,
that a word from inside the file finds the note and one that is not in it
finds nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stage four. Strokes are kept per page in that page's own coordinate
space — PDF points at scale 1 — not in the fixed 1200x1600 space a note's
drawing uses. A PDF cannot use one space: every page has its own size,
and a stroke belongs to the page it was drawn on.
That is what keeps a mark on the word it was drawn over at any zoom and
on any screen, and it is the only form that can be stamped back into the
file in stage seven, where page points are the only coordinates that mean
anything. Measured rather than assumed: zooming moves a stroke by 0.001
of the page.
Pen sizes are scaled by the page width. The sizes are calibrated for the
1200-unit note page, so on a 595-point A4 page the same number would have
drawn twice as thick.
Reading and drawing are separate modes. While reading the ink layer takes
no pointer events, so scrolling and selecting text reach the page beneath
it; while drawing, a finger still scrolls and only a pen or mouse marks,
because a touch-drag on a phone means scroll far more often than it means
draw. The drawing can be hidden without being erased, for reading the
original clean.
The server accepted only the single-page shape; it now takes either and
counts strokes across pages for its limit.
Carried over from notes: the save token guard, so the six-second poller
adopting a response issued before the local save cannot undo what was
just drawn. The suite waits nine seconds and checks the ink is still
there — that bug has cost strokes twice before.
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 vector clocks in the server were never reached: no client sent one,
so the branch was dead and every write was a blind overwrite. Not "the
newer edit wins" — "the request that arrives last wins", which is worse:
a phone that was offline all day buries the laptop's newer work simply by
reconnecting late.
Each write now carries baseUpdatedAt, the revision it was written on top
of. If the note has moved on since, the incoming edit still wins — a
rejection would throw away what was just typed — but the state it
replaces is kept as a version marked "conflict", so both exist and the
history is where you choose. Clocks could have told a real conflict from
a device catching up, but that precision only pays off with a merge
interface, and this reuses the version history already built.
adoptRevision() stores the revision the server reports back, or the
second save in a row would be flagged as conflicting with the first.
Also removed, as agreed:
- POST /api/notes/pdf — accepted PDFs that nothing could ever read back,
with no retrieval route and no viewer. The readme advertised "PDF
Import & Annotation"; that claim is gone too.
- POST /api/sync — a batch endpoint the client never called.
- the tags column — notebooks, starring and search already cover it.
Columns on existing databases are left in place. Dropping them buys
nothing and is not worth touching a live database for.
Tables now have a right-click menu (editor/tableMenu.js) for rows,
columns, header and merging. It needs stopPropagation: without it the
same event reaches window, where the menu that is mounting reads it as a
click elsewhere and closes instantly — the reason the other context menus
in App.jsx already do this.
92 browser checks across seven suites, 125 unit tests.
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>
They lived in a scratch directory under /tmp, which was cleared overnight;
four of the five were simply gone. Whatever they were worth, they were
worth nothing kept there.
Rewritten against a shared lib.mjs. The old ones registered their users
through the sign-up form, which no longer exists — each suite now creates
a throwaway account through the admin API and deletes it afterwards, so a
run leaves the database as it found it. The previous generation left nine
accounts behind; those are gone too.
Three test hooks went into the app, each of which earns its place beyond
testing: aria-label on the note title (the sidebar search box is also a
text input, and a screen reader could not tell them apart either),
data-note-row on list rows, data-user on admin rows.
Two suites were flaky in ways worth naming, because both were the test
misreading the app rather than the app misbehaving:
- ticking a task then inserting a note link put the link inside the task
list, since Control+End lands there. Verified against the server that
the tick itself persists correctly; the suite now leaves the list first
and asserts where the link ended up.
- the note-title lookup matched the sidebar's Trash entry, which wears the
same emoji as a note row.
56 checks across five suites, all passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
