sdocx2pdf: a tool for converting Samsung Notes documents to vector PDFs
Hi all. Please excuse the new account. I deleted my old one some time ago.
I've made a tool for converting Samsung Notes documents to vector PDFs. It is capable of converting handwriting to smooth curves and will embed into the output PDF any PDFs that you added in the Samsung Notes app, so you can use it to produce vector PDFs of handwritten notes alone or handwritten annotations to PDFs.
Right now, the tool only does handwriting and embedded PDFs because those are the things I needed it for. However, as part of the project I reverse-engineered and wrote a parser for the SDOCX format that Samsung Notes uses to store documents, so sdocx2pdf knows about the non-handwriting features in your document; it only ignores them because I haven't added logic for how it should add them to the PDF. It shouldn't be too hard to extend sdocx2pdf so that it can also do images, typed text and shapes.
I've been working on this on and off for some time now in a private GitHub repository, but I have decided to make it public now despite it being technically incomplete for two main reasons: first, if I don't release it when it is incomplete, I'll never release it at all, and second, it already solves the problem I needed it to solve (converting the notes I take during lectures to nice readable PDFs), so there's probably someone else out there who can benefit from it in its current form. Even so, I intend to continue working on it to fix the deficiencies mentioned above, and just generally to improve it.
Hopefully it works well for you – if not, please let me know (preferably by opening an issue on GitHub, but otherwise here in the comments). I've only tested this on my specific hardware (Galaxy Tab S11 and the S Pen it comes with), and while I do expect it to work for handwriting data produced by other hardware, I don't know if it will work quite as well. Specifically, I don't know whether older hardware might produce handwriting data with fewer events.
sdocx2pdf runs on Linux, macOS and Windows and works with documents produced using the Samsung Notes apps for Android and Windows.
The link is to the GitHub repository. The above rehashes parts of the README there, but if you are interested I would recommend reading that as it is more in-depth. It explains how to use the tool and more about what the current capabilities and limitations are. There is also an explanation of how it works, for those interested. The tool is written in Rust, and the code is MIT-licensed.
I look forward to hearing what you guys think. Cheers :)