Tablet PCs have never really taken off. Some blame the form factor; some the high price/performance ratio; some the lack of a killer app. If tablets are ever going to find their niche, it will be thanks to developers like Denis Auroux, whose Xournal utility lets users take handwritten notes using a stylus on a tablet PC or similar device.
Auroux, a French math professor now teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, started working on Xournal in late 2005, soon after getting his first tablet PC. “I quickly decided that I wasn’t happy with the Windows software that shipped with it and that I’d rather use Linux. At the time there wasn’t any good note-taking software for Linux tablets (Jarnal was available and worked OK, but I wasn’t quite happy with its user interface or its performance at the time), so I decided to write my own. I had a first version ready by early 2006, and have been improving functionality ever since.”
Because it allows you to write on top of a PDF file, Xournal is useful not only for taking notes in classes or meetings, but also for annotating documents. In fact, that’s its main purpose for non-tablet users. Users’ annotations are stored in a separate file by default, but you can easily combine the initial PDF and your annotations and export them as a new PDF document. With that feature you could, for example, make a PDF template out of a blank sheet of music staves and open it for annotation whenever you wanted to write music.
What distinguishes Xournal from the handful of similar programs available are the ease of use and responsiveness of the user interface for common tasks, as well as the graphical quality of the strokes drawn using a tablet. Unlike most note-taking applications, Xournal uses the high-resolution data provided by the tablet.
Auroux wrote Xournal in C because it’s the language he’s most familiar with, and because of the high performance needed. At heart, a stylus-input program is basically a graphics editor, and a full page of handwriting can contain more than 50,000 line segments, Auroux says. Xournal relies on GTK+ and libgnomecanvas to provide the user interface. Auroux chose GTK+ over KDE because it felt more lightweight and was closer to the programming models he was familiar with, and libgnomecanvas because of its functionality and performance.
Since he put the project on SourceForge.net three and a half years ago, Auroux says, “Various people have been contributing useful patches and feature suggestions on the SourceForge.net trackers; submitting a tracker item or e-mailing me is usually a good way of getting in touch if you have an idea or want to help. So far I’ve been able to manage Xournal on my own, which is probably best from a perspective of carefully reviewing patches to ensure reliability and user-friendliness (ideally, note-taking software should be as dependable and as easy to use as pen and paper); but that will probably have to change some day as the project grows in popularity.”
Auroux has a long list of enhancements he hopes to add for future versions. Among the bigger items are searching handwritten text and collaborative editing over a network connection. Other additions will include copy and paste of images to and from other applications, a lasso tool, a navigation pane with thumbnails, and other interface improvements.
Already, Xournal lets you use your tablet PC in fun and useful ways. For instance, you can take advantage of its ability to easily annotate screenshots and use your tablet to fill in crossword puzzles or sudoku.