InkNote/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

What changed, newest first. One entry per round that went out as an image, with the digests, so it stays possible to tell what is actually running on the server.

Digests are recorded from the registry (docker buildx imagetools inspect), not from the output of docker push.

---

2026-08-12 — A filed note stays filed

Images — web sha256:…, server sha256:…

The server image changed: the bin now hands back a note's chapter with it.

Fixed

• A note put into a chapter came back out of it by itself, a few seconds later. The server had filed it correctly the whole time; the sync that follows rebuilds every local note from the server's answer, and the function doing that never carried chapter_id — so each sync handed back a note belonging to no chapter and the notebook's list took it in again. The bin's query left the column out too, which would have unfiled anything restored from it.
• A separator drawn in a notebook vanished when a chapter was opened. "Which chapter is open" and "which list is on screen" were one value. Opened beside or below, the list still shows the notebook — but everything around it had switched to the chapter, so the notebook's own separators were filtered away and a drag among its rows was measured against the chapter's notes, found nothing, and did nothing.

Changed

• Rearranging is a mode now. The handle button beside the sort menu switches it on; until then no row shows its grip and none can be dragged, and it goes off again by itself when the list is left. Six dots stood beside every title all the time for something done rarely, and an ordinary press could carry a row off.
• Filing a note is back in the row's own menu and the button that had appeared in every row is gone, with the dialog behind it. It belongs with starring, exporting and discarding — things done to a row, in one place.
• Which place a new note lands in is now visible and yours to choose. With a chapter open beside or below, the notebook's list and the chapter are both on screen: pressing in either makes it the one being worked in, marked with a line along its top and the word here, and the + button names it. Before, a new note went into the chapter however far away you had since clicked.
• The account panel closes with Escape. Only a click beside it did, which on a panel that wide means aiming at a sliver of page.

---

2026-08-12 — Chapters as rows, in two views

Images — web sha256:95657aaf…, server sha256:b4db0725…

The server image changed: a color column on chapters, a reorder route, named positions on the note reorder, and the new per-account setting.

Added

• Two ways for a chapter to open, chosen per account: its notes in a further column beside the list, the way OneNote lays out its pages, or unfolded under the chapter's own row. A phone has room for neither and fills the list, with a way back.
• A chapter can be given its own colour, since the point of having them is that they are different places.

Changed

• Chapters sit at the same level as notes and separators — same grip, same drag, same place in a hand-made arrangement. Notes and chapters are numbered from one counter now; separately, the two sequences could not be interleaved and a chapter dragged between two notes would spring back. POST /notes/reorder takes named positions beside the older list of ids, and chapters have a reorder route of their own.

---

2026-08-12 — Moving in one press

Images — web sha256:3700247c…, server unchanged at sha256:181d77be…

Added

• A move button on every note row. Moving used to be a right-click into a submenu — two steps before the list of places appeared, and on a phone a long press followed by a flyout. One press now opens a dialog with the chapters of this notebook and the other notebooks on one screen, marking where the note is now.

Changed

• The spare page in Draw mode reads as an offer, not as a page. A second sheet appeared the moment Draw was pressed, drawn as solid paper, while the count still said "of 1" — which looks like the app inventing a page. It is a dashed outline saying "Draw here to add a page", and it counts only once something is on it.
• + Chapter and + Separator are the same shape. The new one had been built without matching the old, and the old one's 19px target was one a finger misses. Separator labels also match a chapter's name in size now.

---

2026-08-12 — Chapters

Images — web sha256:790ff73a…, server sha256:181d77be…

The server image changed: it takes a chapters table and a chapter_id column on notes, both added on start.

Added

• Chapters — folders inside a notebook. A note is in one or in none; tapping a chapter opens its own list, with a way back out. Removing a chapter never removes what it held: the notes come back to the notebook, and the dialog says so with the number affected. Separators now belong to the list they were drawn in, so a line drawn in one chapter does not appear in another.

Changed

• A notebook's design is its own. A 45-degree stripe texture was baked into every cover at 1.5% white — meant to be imperceptible, visibly banding on the darker gradients, and a second pattern fighting the one actually chosen. And the same pair of rings sat in the middle of every notebook. The mark belongs to the design now, and the designs whose pattern already fills the face wear none.

Fixed

• A submenu was being clipped away on a wide screen. The menu had been given overflow-y: auto, which cuts off anything flying out sideways — so the list of notebooks under Move to… was invisible and every click on it landed on the note list behind. The side was also inverted: right: 100% places a panel on the left.
• A separator was effectively invisible on a phone — a one-pixel hairline in the border colour with faint grey text on near-black.

---

2026-08-12 — Two-part covers, and an app that can be installed

Images — web sha256:1217b81b…, server sha256:3303d3dc…

The server image changed: it takes a cover_pattern column, added on start.

Changed

• A cover is now a colour and a pattern, chosen in turn, rather than a list with the combinations someone happened to write out. Every combination is available, and each pattern is previewed over the colour in hand. Covers saved during the day the patterns were one list are read back as the pair they were drawn as, so nothing repaints itself.

Fixed

• The install button never appeared, even over HTTPS. Two causes, both in this app rather than in anyone's configuration:
  • beforeinstallprompt fires once, early — usually before React has mounted — and is never fired again, so a listener added from inside a component simply missed it. It is caught at the top of index.html now.
  • The manifest is fetched without credentials unless the link says otherwise. Behind a reverse proxy that authenticates in front of the app, that request comes back as the proxy's login page and the browser reads it as an invalid manifest — while the app itself works perfectly, because its own requests carry the cookie. The link now says crossorigin="use-credentials".
• The service worker could cache a proxy's login page as the application. Nothing checked that a response was the thing that had been asked for, so a lapsed session could be stored as the app shell: it then "worked offline" by showing a login screen it could never get past, curable only by clearing the site's data by hand. Redirected and unsuccessful responses are no longer cached, and the cache name is bumped so anything already stored under the old rules is dropped.

---

2026-08-12 — Making the phone work

Images — web sha256:5ea846f3…, server unchanged at sha256:06f94f43…

Fixed

• A note made offline lost everything written into it. Its create reached the server, the server named it something else, and every edit still queued behind it went on addressing the name only that device knew — a 404, five retries, then thrown away. The note arrived empty and untitled with no sign anything had been lost. The queue is now repointed along with the database. The same held for a notebook made offline.
• The order of notes could not be changed on a phone. The list used the HTML5 drag API, which mobile browsers never fire from touch. It uses pointer events now, and every row has a grip: pressing the row itself still scrolls, and holding it still opens the menu.
• "Move to…" opened off the side of the screen and could not be opened at all with a finger. It was pinned to the right of the menu and reacted only to hover. It now opens on a tap, unfolds in place on a narrow screen, and flips to the other side on a wide one when there is no room.
• The menu itself is placed by measuring rather than by assuming it is 220px wide, so it can no longer hang off an edge; rows are tall enough to hit with a thumb, and Escape closes it.

Changed

• The install entry is always there. It used to appear only when the browser offered a prompt, so where installing was impossible there was nothing on screen at all — no button, no reason. It now says which of the fixable causes applies: served over plain HTTP, or a browser that wants to be asked through its own menu.

---

2026-08-12 — Covers, the search box, and room to write in the margin

Images — web sha256:c1222665…, server sha256:06f94f43…

The server image changed: it sends the default number of versions with the account, so the notebook dialog can name it instead of guessing.

Added

• Patterned notebook covers — ruled paper, graph paper, pinstripe, bands, dots, cross-hatch, linen, washes, a ledger. Drawn entirely in CSS: no image files, nothing to upload, crisp at any size, and they work offline like everything else. Existing notebooks keep exactly the cover they had; the new ones are appended, never inserted.

Changed

• The search box in a notebook is simply there, and the button that used to open it is gone. A magnifying glass cost a click and having to remember that searching was possible; the box is one line and says for itself what it does.
• Margin notes are bigger — the column went from 208px to 288px and a card from three short lines to about five. Three lines is a caption, not a remark on a passage, and the space beside the page was sitting mostly empty.
• The notebook dialog's cover grid scrolls, so the dialog cannot run past the bottom of a laptop screen and take the Create button with it.

Fixed

• The notebook edit dialog was still part German — "Versionen pro Notiz", "Vorgabe" — and would not say what the server's default actually is. It now names it (50), read from the server rather than written into the interface, since MAX_VERSIONS_PER_NOTE can be changed and a hardcoded number would quietly start lying.

---

2026-08-11 — Margins and a stray placeholder

Images — web sha256:3a181ff3…, server unchanged at sha256:0832ee2b…

Changed

• Narrower margins on the sheet — the column went from about 73 characters to about 80, leaving roughly 8% of the paper as margin either side instead of 117px of empty page down each edge.

Fixed

• "Start writing..." was printed at the foot of every page with a break after it. The placeholder extension styles [contenteditable]:empty::before, and the spacer holding a gap open is exactly that — empty, and not editable.

---

2026-08-11 — Writing on paper

Images — web sha256:b764a9d8…, server unchanged at sha256:0832ee2b…

Added

• You write on paper. Each page is a sheet of its own, centred, with a gap after it — the same way the PDF reader draws its pages. The sheet used to appear only once you started drawing, which left the writing mode looking like text floating in an empty pane, and made the space either side of the column read as a void rather than as a margin.
• Text is broken against those sheets, so no paragraph is ever cut in half by a gap. The breaks are decorations: nothing enters the document, reaches the server, or appears in an export.

Fixed

• A note with a drawing could not be typed in at all. The box wrapping each page's ink layer lay over the text and swallowed every click meant for it. The canvas inside was already deaf to the pointer; its wrapper was not. Introduced the same day, with per-page drawing.

---

2026-08-11 — Drawing on every page, and PDFs findable everywhere

Images — web sha256:dc804f7b…, server sha256:0832ee2b…

The server image changed this round: it takes a new column and two routes. docker compose pull && docker compose up -d — the column is added on start.

Added

• A PDF is searchable on every device, not only on the one that opened it. The device that imports the file reads it there and then — the server still has no PDF library and never opens one — and the extracted text is stored beside the file, encrypted, so every other device can find the document without ever downloading it. This is what makes an archive of scanned invoices work: they are filed and then never opened, so waiting for someone to open one meant waiting forever.
• A drawing runs over as many pages as the note has. The ink used to be stuck on page one while the writing carried on without it. Pages are numbered the way the PDF reader numbers them, and there is always one blank page past the end to start a new one on. The bin clears the page being looked at; undo still works on the drawing as a whole.
• A drawing that lives entirely on page one is still stored in the old shape, so an ordinary note is written exactly as it always was and an older client still shows it.

Fixed

• A drawing exported in a ZIP was lost on re-import. The exporter has written drawings/<note>.png since the interface was put into English; the importer was still looking for zeichnungen/<note>.png and found nothing. Both names are read now, and so are the further pages of a drawing.

---

2026-08-11 — The writing column

Images — web sha256:ed11f034…, server unchanged at sha256:1648498f…

Changed

• The note column is centred again. It had been pinned to the left margin so the start of every line would always be in the same place; on a wide window that left the whole right half of the pane as one dead block.
• A page surface was drawn behind the text to give that block a meaning, and reverted the same day: it made the sheet sit hard against the left edge, which was worse than the problem it solved.

---

2026-08-11 — Pages, typefaces, alignment

Images — web sha256:3b040d99…, server sha256:1648498f…

Added

• Page count while writing. The toolbar says Page 2 of 4, in the same words the PDF reader uses. Pages are counted, never stored: the note stays one document, and a test asserts no page ever reaches the stored body.
• The typeface is a per-account setting — serif, sans or mono, chosen under Account → Profile. On the account rather than in the browser, so it follows you to the phone.
• Text alignment, with its own TipTap extension rather than the official one, so the schema stays in files this project owns. Left is the default and is never written into the document. In Markdown, non-left blocks travel as <div align="…"> — the one form most readers still honour — and the importer reads it back onto the paragraphs.

Fixed

• The Markdown exporter did not put a blank line between top-level blocks, so consecutive paragraphs ran together in other readers.

---

2026-08-11 — English throughout, and the PDF toolbar

Added

• Search inside a notebook, from the note list. The sidebar's global search was removed: searching from inside a notebook should mean searching that notebook.
• New note / Upload PDF / Import Markdown all live under the one + button.

Changed

• The interface is English throughout. It had drifted into two languages.
• The two visibility switches — drawing and margin notes — sit together at the far right of the PDF toolbar, because they mean the same kind of thing.
• The drawing tools appear next to the Draw button, not past everything else.
• A separator is renamed and removed by right-click, with a confirmation for the removal.

Fixed

• Hiding the drawing also hid the margin notes. Each switch now hides only its own thing.

---

2026-08-10 — Notes on passages

Added

• Pinned notes in a PDF. A remark can be attached to a passage, and is shown in the margin beside the page — not written on top of it. On a phone, where there is no margin, the same notes open as a bottom sheet.
• Margin notes can be linked from the notes panel, so a pinned remark can be written about at length and still lead back to the passage it came from.

Fixed

• A grey drag indicator stayed visible in the note list after a drag. It was a borderTop sitting beside a border shorthand in one style object.
• The server stored an overlay holding only pinned notes as NULL, throwing every one of them away, because it counted strokes and nothing else.

---

2026-08-09 — Arranging a notebook

Added

• Sorting per notebook, remembered on the notebook itself, including an arrangement made by hand — which comes back intact after filtering.
• Separators to group notes inside a hand-made arrangement.
• Markdown import, single files or a ZIP this app exported.
• Moving notes between notebooks.

Fixed

• Switching to Draw shrank the page from 733px to 460px. The editor was a flex item at the default flex: 0 1 auto, so it was only as wide as its widest row — the toolbar, which loses a dozen buttons in Draw.

---

2026-08-08 — PDFs

Added

• Import a PDF, read it, select its text, draw on each page, and export it with the drawings written in.
• Notes written beside a PDF.
• Uploaded files are encrypted at rest, like note bodies already were, and stored as deduplicated, content-addressed attachments.
• Unused attachments are freed; versions are kept by count rather than by age.
• Export as Markdown or PDF; the browser suites moved into the repository.

Changed

• Vector clocks were never read. Replaced with a conflict check that works.
• Public sign-up removed — an administrator creates the accounts.

---

Earlier

TipTap editor, version history, full-text search and attachments (2026-08-07); drawing sync with WebP/JPEG support (2026-06-21); the first syncing alpha and PWA (2026-02-18).