Essential note taking

NotedELN has a deliberately sparse user interface intended to encourage you to write notes without demanding too much of your attention for technicalities and esthetical choices. It is the author’s hope that the simplicity of the system will allow users to come to experience note taking as a natural and unremarkable part of their experimental work and data analysis rather than as a separate chore.

Creating a new notebook

When NotedELN starts, it displays a list of recent notebooks and also offers the choice of opening a notebook that is not on the list or to create a new notebook. When you click “Create new notebook,” it will immediately ask you where you want to store that notebook. It will then open the front page of your notebook, where you can change its title and add your name as the author as well as your affiliation or other relevant information. It is highly recommended that you give your notebook a meaningful title, as that title will show up in NotedELN’s opening screen in the future.

Other options on the opening screen are “Open other existing notebook,” which speaks for itself, and “Clone hosted notebook for local use,” which is explained under Archiving (version control), below.

To leave the front page and go to the first actual page of your new notebook, press [Page Down] or [Ctrl][Shift][+] on your keyboard, or use the navigation buttons in the tool bar.

Creating new entries

To create a new entry, press [Ctrl][Shift][+] or click the nav-plus icon in the tool bar. To encourage you to give your entries meaningful titles, the cursor is positioned in the title field. The title you give to your entry here is automatically copied to the table of contents.

To move from the title to the first paragraph of your entry, simple press [Enter] or [Tab].

Adding text

Text mode is NotedELN’s default mode, so you should be able to start typing right away. If not, click the type mode icon (or press [F2]) to enter text mode. Click below existing contents or inside an existing paragraph to start editing. Note that it is not possible to edit an entry that is older than 24 hours.

Text may be cut-and-pasted as you would expect using [Ctrl][X], [Ctrl][C], and [Ctrl][V] as in other programs, but NotedELN does not have an “undo” mechanism. To protect you against accidental deletion, you have to explicitly press [Delete] to delete a selection. (Just typing “over it” does not work.) Instead of deleting something from your notes, consider crossing it out so your thought process remains documented.

Adding graphics

Graphics can be added by dragging an image file onto the page or by pressing [Ctrl][V] to paste an image from the system clipboard.

Various plot symbols as well as freehand lines can be added using the mark and squiggle icons ([F4] and [F5]). Straight line segments can be added by double clicking the squiggle icon (or by pressing [Shift][F5]) which turns the squiggly line into a straight line: straight. Several choices for symbol size, line width, and color are available. (These options are not extendible. By limiting the options, NotedELN hopes to encourage you to not spend too much time thinking about the perfect color for your annotation.)

Text annotations can be added to the graphics canvas using the note icon ([F6]) and either clicking to place text or dragging to place text with a connector line. Type faces and font sizes cannot be changed (again, on purpose).

Images, plot symbols, freehand and straight lines, and text annotations can be moved around, cropped, and resized by selecting the move icon (by clicking it or pressing [F3]). As a convenience, a mouse drag with [Control] held performs the same manipulations without selecting the move icon.

Also with the move icon selected, you can change the wrap width of text annotations by dragging the right edge of your annotation. The end of a connector line can be moved by holding [Shift] while dragging the annotation. (A note without a connector line can be given a connector line by Shift-dragging; connector lines automatically vanish if their ends are dragged into the text of the note.)

Graphics objects can be deleted with the move icon selected by hovering the cursor over them and pressing [Delete]. They can be restored by pressing [Insert]. An empty graphics canvas can be deleted by pressing [Delete]. [Ctrl][Delete] works in any mode, provided there is no active text cursor.

Adding videos

By popular demand, you can now embed [1] videos in NotedELN. Support is limited to whatever formats Qt can play on your system. Drag a video file into your notebook just as you would an image file. Embedded videos are outfitted with play/pause controls and a slider to scrub through the timeline.

Video objects can be resized and deleted as other images. At present, they cannot be cropped.

Adding tables

Tables can be inserted as their own paragraphs. Simply start typing the contents of the first table cell, then hit [Tab] to create a second cell. Navigation within a table is with [Tab] and [Shift][Tab] for left and right, [Enter] and [Shift][Enter] for next and previous line, and of course the arrow keys. New columns or rows can be inserted by holding [Control] while navigating. Columns or rows can be deleted by selecting the entire column or row and pressing [Delete]. To make this easier, [Ctrl][A] cycles between selecting an entire cell, an entire row, an entire column, and the entire table.

Saving your work

You don’t have to! NotedELN automatically saves your work every 10 seconds and when you navigate to a different entry (if you have made any changes). If you have configured version control <vc>, your changes are automatically committed and pushed to the server every 5 minutes and when you close the notebook.

Editing old entries

Cannot be done, by design. Just as you cannot change the outcome of yesterday’s experiments, yesterday’s notes are fixed.

However, you can use the note icon ([F6]) to add so-called “late notes” to a previous entry. Late notes are automatically set in a distinct color and decorated with a date stamp. They may be manipulated just like text annotations on a graphics canvas.

To indicate that an entry cannot be edited, NotedELN switches to “browse” mode, indicated by the browse icon being automatically selected.

If you want to add more than just a note to a previous entry, the common idiom is to create a “continuation entry” by pressing [Ctrl][Shift][C]. This adds a late note saying “(see p. nnn)” to the current page, and creates a new entry titled by adding “(cont’d)” to the current entry’s title. The new entry (including its title) is fully editable as you’d expect.

Exporting and printing

NotedELN can export your entire notebook or portions of it to pdf or print them directly. Simply press [Ctrl][P] or click the nav-print icon to open the print dialog and select either “Print to pdf” or an actual printer.

Individual entries can also be exported as html by pressing [Ctrl][Shift][S]. This feature is still slightly experimental. Styling is not yet quite how I would like it to be. In the future, html output may be integrated with the print dialog.

Searching your notebook

NotedELN incorporates a simple but very useful full-text search facility. Press [Ctrl][F] or click the nav-find icon to open the search dialog, type any word or phrase, and press [Enter] or click “OK.” A list with search results from the entire notebook will open; click on a result to navigate to the relevant entry, or shift-click to open it in a new window.

Conclusion

I hope that NotedELN will be useful to you, and that it will encourage you to take more—and more usable—notes. I love to hear happy users’ stories. I also welcome bug reports of all kinds. And in the unlikely event that NotedELN appears to have chewed up your notes, please do not just throw away the broken notebook. Although I cannot offer any guarantees (see the GPL license text!), it almost certainly can be fixed. And I would be happy to try and help.

Footnote