Ink and Drawing

Ink and drawing

Write and draw with a pen on your pages. Beta 4 has the core pen tools, palm rejection, shapes, eraser, and lasso. Everything except start-up is untested by hand, so check the test checklist before you rely on a feature.

Writing with a pen

OpenNote is built for a pen first. A pen draws, a finger scrolls by default, and a tap never does something hidden. Ink stores the raw pen points: position, pressure, tilt, and time. Drawing can get better later without changing your notes.

What you can do

Feature	Status
Pens, pencil, and highlighter	Built. Respond to pressure and tilt, with colors from the brand palette.
Erasers	Built. A stroke eraser, a partial eraser, and the pen's own eraser button.
Palm rejection	Built. While a pen is near the screen, touch never draws.
Lasso	Built. Selects ink and text together, to move, resize, recolor, or delete.
Shapes	Built. Draw a shape and hold still to snap it to a circle, rectangle, triangle, arrow, and more. Resize and edit with handles.
Straight lines	Built. Hold and release to snap to 15 degree steps near horizontal and vertical.
Insert space	Built. Drag a line across the page to push everything below it down, or up to close a gap.
Ink anchored to text	Built. Underlines and circles drawn on typed text move with those words.
Zoom writing box	Built. Write large in a strip at the bottom, and the ink lands small on the page.
Pen and touch gestures	Built. Scribble to erase, and two-finger double tap to undo. Each can be turned off.
Eraser and lasso filters	Built. Erase only highlighter, or lasso only ink.
Pen buttons	Built. Choose what the pen's side button and eraser end do.
Pressure and steady pen	Built. A pressure curve for each pen device, and an optional stabilizer for shaky hands.
Shape tools	Built. A ruler, a protractor, and snap to grid.
Shape libraries	Built. Store and reuse shapes. Text goes in shapes.
Shape connectors	Built. Connect shapes with lines and arrows.
Ink replay	Built. Play back ink in the order you drew it, or step through it frame by frame.
Hover preview	Built. Hover over a pen stroke to see a faint preview of another tool's effect.
Canvas lock	Built. Lock a page to prevent accidental edits.
Handwriting to text	Built. The "Writing pen" converts handwriting to typed text as you write, and keeps the original ink. See On-device intelligence.
Reflow and tidy handwriting	Built. Rewrap, straighten, and even out handwriting.
Describe a drawing	Built. Tell OpenNote what a drawing is, and it can help with the next step.
Convert lasso to table	Built. Lasso cells and turn them into a table.
Pen editing of text	Built. Write corrections over text.

Large pages stay smooth because finished strokes are drawn into cached tiles. Pen library (fountain pen, brush, calligraphy, dashed, dotted, and dotted pens) is not yet built. Left-handed mode is planned.

How fast will it feel?

The goal is ink within 25 ms of the pen on a 60 Hz screen. Phase 1 measured the web engine that OpenNote uses, WebView2, on a 120 Hz screen. Ink appeared about 14 ms after the pen moved. That is about one frame behind a plain Windows window. Two more fixes are planned for Phase 5.

A check with a real Surface Pen and a Wacom tablet, filmed at 240 frames per second, hasn't been done yet. Its result will go into the ink latency decision record. See Phase 1 spike results.

Devices

Phase 5 testing covers a Surface Pro, a Surface Laptop Studio, a Wacom tablet, and touch laptops. Every action also works with a mouse or keyboard.

Related pages

• Page views, printing, and PDF for exporting ink as vector graphics.
• Audio recording for strokes that play back with the sound.