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>
