Digital ink: Rnote app for Windows compared with Microsoft Journal

RNote for Windows is a free and open-source app that began its life on Linux and now has a Windows version available for download via GitHub. Rnote feels old-school and technical. Its chief claim to fame is its feature of annotating PDF documents. It has digital ink capacity for stylus input, and it can handle keyboard and computer mouse input, too. Besides other output formats, Rnote has SVG output. Rnote depends on the Windows file system for document organization.

Microsoft Journal is a digital ink tool with handwriting recognition, which is its main feature. Journal comes from Microsoft and is optimized for Surface tablet computers and styluses. Journal has notebook-style pages and folders, making it possible to use the copy command to export text via the clipboard in digitized format. The Journal data is organized in the Journal app. Since Journal has handwriting recognition, the handwriting is searchable. The user can export to PDF and to Microsoft OneNote.