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Xournal: Kid-Friendly Note Taker and PDF Annotator

Posted by dixiedancer on · 6 comments
http://robinsrantsandraves.wordpress.com; By Robin 		Mail this story
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Great for kids starting school to take digital notes in class - even drawing diagrams and scrawling little pictures. And a pdf annotator to boot!

Here's a simple tool for use on a laptop or netbook that can save alot of trees by letting users take notes on their laptop using typed text AND a stylus on the touchpad to write and draw. It's also handy for filling out those pdf forms that expect kids to write legibly in tiny little font to fit those undersized boxes. Simple, lightweight, graphical, and fun!

It's called Xournal (http://xournal.sourceforge.net) and it's probably in your distro's repositories already. It's not new, but as school is just starting for alot of kids this month, now is a great time to tell you about this handy, fun tool.

This review (my first attempt at writing a software "review"), including screenshots, is at http://robinsrantsandraves.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/xournal-...

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Comments (6)

JaseP ·
Xournal's great and I use it all the time. I just wish it were as available on Android as it is in standard Linux distributions and Maemo (Nokia N900, etc). That said, I have found a great note taking app in Android and also use Grafitti for Android for note taking.
Jeff91 ·
In order for normal Linux apps to work on Android, Android would have to start running more code than just cr@ppy java.

This is one of the many reasons Meego/Maemo are so important.

~Jeff
Fettoosh ·
Quoting:In order for normal Linux apps to work on Android, Android would have to start running more code than just cr@ppy java.


Fear not, we probably won't need Android. Check this demo out

http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/08/plasma-active-contour-demo/

JaseP ·
Quoting: In order for normal Linux apps to work on Android, Android would have to start running more code than just cr@ppy java.


Good point, but there is Xournal's closely related sibling, Jarnal, which is also excellent and based on java.

Jeff91 ·
Except QT/KDE is a bloatware of a desktop.

"The core EFL libraries even with Elementary are about half the size of the equivalent "small stack" of GTK+ that things like GNOME use. It is in the realm of one quarter the size of Qt."

I know tablets are getting more powerful, but that power should be saved for the user's applications, not wasted on the UI it is running.

~Jeff
Fettoosh ·
Quoting:Except QT/KDE is a bloatware of a desktop.


Bloatware is code that is not being used and consequently not needed, or badly written code. I don't believe the KDE libraries have much badly written code. What they have is a lot of code that is needed for the numerous features of KDE Desktop, and some special functions that have duplicate code that is in Qt functions.

The developers are working on two prong solution. They are merging some of the special functionality needed by KDE into similar Qt functions, and the other is re-organizing the libraries and excluding what is not needed for the Active Plasma (Tablet & Mobile) for much smaller footprint.

I guess will see if it stays bloated or not.

[Edited] Added link for other demos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GAFfjscVyg

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