Ink Away 4.0.0: handwrite on any EPUB, MOBI, PDF or comic in KOReader, and your notes move with the words when you change the font size. Plus layers for drawing
Hey everyone,
Ink Away 4.0.0 is out, and yet again it’s the biggest update so far!
3.3.0 turned Ink Away into a notebook app; 4.0.0 takes the pen into your books and gives your drawings layers.
You can now write, highlight, draw shapes and drop pictures right onto the pages of any book KOReader opens: EPUB, MOBI, FB2, PDF, DjVu and comics. On a reflowing book the ink follows its words when you change the font size. Drawings can now be drawn in layers, so you can sketch, ink and colour each on their own. On top of that there’s a notebook for every book, pen pressure, a whole new set of pens (including a watercolor that blends and a smudge that mixes colours like paint), dark mode, paper colours, a guide and updates from inside Ink Away.
For anyone new to Ink Away: it’s a drawing and note-taking plugin for KOReader. You can sketch with your finger or stylus, keep handwritten and typed notes in notebooks organized a lot like OneNote, annotate PDFs and export everything to PDF or PNG.
Write on your books
Swipe down the right edge and the page you’re reading becomes your canvas. It’s also in the Tools tab, under Ink Away → Annotate the book.
- Every tool works on the page: pen, highlighter, eraser, shapes, text, pictures and the lasso. Shapes and pictures can go right over the text, so you can circle a word or put an illustration next to the passage it belongs to.
- It works on any book KOReader opens: EPUB, MOBI, FB2, PDF, DjVu, CBZ and the rest.
- Ink follows the text. On a reflowing book every stroke is anchored to the words it was written beside. When you change the font size, the margins or the orientation, your notes move with their words. On PDFs and comics the ink keeps its place on the page and follows the zoom.
- Smart highlighter. A highlighter stroke over text becomes KOReader’s own highlight, in the pen’s colour, and shows up in your highlights list like any other. Wobbly strokes and ones that run into the margin still snap to the words. Over empty space it stays ink.
- Erasing over a book cuts strokes where you rub, like a real eraser. “Erase whole strokes” brings back the old one-swipe eraser.
- The toolbar can sit on any side of the screen. It has its own page turn buttons and folds away when you want the whole page.
- Your annotations live next to the book’s own KOReader data. They follow the book when you move or rename it, and KOReader’s Reset leaves them alone. Deleting the book, or “Delete all annotations on this book”, sends them to Ink Away’s trash for 30 days.
- Ink Away sets up the book gestures for you, but only where your gesture manager has nothing on them yet. If your right edge is taken (by warmth on a Kobo, say), you get two-finger diagonal swipes instead, and a notice tells you which ones you got.
Book notes
Swipe up the right edge for the book’s own notebook.
- It opens in a window over the page, so you can still see what you’re reading around it.
- Every chapter gets its own page, titled with the chapter’s name and kept in the book’s order, so the notebook’s contents end up matching the book. Opening the notes takes you straight to the chapter you’re in.
- Fullscreen turns the window into the full app, on the same page. A tap outside the window closes it, saved.
- Each book’s notebook lives in your library, in a “Book notes” folder. Outside a book, the same swipe opens Ink Away.
Layers
Drawings can now be drawn in layers, up to five. They’re off until you want them: File -> Layers turns them on, and what you’ve drawn so far becomes the first layer.
- A small strip at the right, shown only while layers are on, adds a layer and picks the one you draw on.
- Tap the layer you’re on for its menu: show or hide, rename, move up or down, merge down or delete. Layers are numbered by their place, so they stay 1, 2, 3 after a merge.
- Colour under your line art. A stroke on a lower layer stays under the layers above it, even while you’re drawing it.
- The eraser, the lasso and the paint bucket only touch the layer you’re on, and the eraser shows the layers underneath as it goes.
- Merge a layer into the one under it, or turn layers off to merge them all into one drawing. Hidden layers stay out of exports.
- No layer is kept as an image of its own, so drawing on layers is as fast as on a plain page and barely uses more memory.
New pens
- Pen pressure: on pen readers like the Kindle Scribe and Kobos with a stylus, the line follows how hard you press. You can switch it off in Pen and input if you prefer even lines.
- Ballpoint, Fountain and Calligraphy, the last one with its own nib angle.
- See-through pens that blend with the page: Highlighter (the text stays black on top), Marker and Watercolor. Watercolor is also smoother and three times faster than before.
- Smudge: drag through your ink like a finger through wet paint. It only moves ink, never the paper, pictures or text, and it mixes colours the way paint does, so yellow pushed into blue turns green.
- A new pen case: up to 20 saved pens, each drawn at its real size. Tap + for a new pen of any kind, and hold one to move, copy or remove it. You start with seven: Fineliner, Ballpoint, Pencil, Calligraphy, Highlighter, Watercolor and Smudge.
- A floating pen strip with your first saved pens (on by default on stylus readers), and the pen’s colour now shows under the Pen button.
- Acrylic and Stipple have left the picker(good riddance!). Drawings that use them still show them.
Gestures and pen buttons
- Choose what every gesture and pen button does, from one list of actions. Ink Away warns you when two would clash.
- By default, holding the pen’s side button turns it into a highlighter, and the eraser end erases.
Dark mode and paper colours
Last time I said Ink Away should fit in with however you’ve set up your reader. This time it goes further:
- Dark mode for the toolbars, menus and library: Light, Dark or following KOReader’s night mode. Your page and your colours are never changed.
- Paper colours: twelve papers on colour screens (White, Cream, Sandpaper, Legal pad, Mint, Sky, Blush, Lavender, Kraft, Blueprint, Chalkboard and Black) and white or black on grey ones.
- The ruling and grid take the paper’s shade, so they always show.
- Black ink and text turn white on a dark paper.
- Exports come out on the same paper.
- Each notebook and drawing keeps its own paper.
Help, and updates from inside Ink Away
- A guide: short cards on the things a glance doesn’t show, by topic, each with a “Show me” button.
- A notice the first time Ink Away opens, telling you which book gestures you got.
- Test pen and touch, in Settings: it shows how your pen, its buttons and your hand arrive, including the pressure range your pen reports. If you report a pen bug, a screenshot of this helps me a lot.
- Check for updates: Settings → Updates shows the latest release and, kept apart from it, any newer prerelease, each with its notes. Tap Install and it downloads, checks and installs it; restart KOReader to use it.
- Once a day, and only if Wi-Fi is already on, Ink Away looks by itself in the background, so it never turns on your Wi-Fi or slows your drawing. When there’s something new you get a short message and a dot notification on the Settings button. You can turn this off, and the daily check only tells you about prereleases if you ask it to.
- It only reads GitHub’s public list of releases and sends nothing about your device. KOReader normally puts your device model in its web requests; Ink Away leaves it out.
- The download is checked against GitHub’s own checksum before anything changes, and your current version is kept aside until you restart.
- You can try a prerelease and go back to the latest release whenever you like, but never to an older version.
- This is the first version with it, so you’ll need to install 4.0.0 by hand one last time.
Tidier and smoother
- Settings is tidier. Pen settings live in Pen and input, every setting has one place, and Settings fits on a Paperwhite screen without scrolling.
- See-through pens on grey e-ink refresh only what changed as you draw.
- A quick drag on a slider no longer moves the whole menu.
Android and Boox (please test!)
- On a Boox, Ink Away now asks the screen for its fast refresh mode while you draw.
- On Android readers whose pen KOReader still reports as a finger (before KOReader 2026.08), the pen draws again instead of scrolling the page. A tip explains slow drawing on readers that need a setting changed.
- I still don’t have a Boox or an Android pen reader to try this on. If you do, please tell me how drawing feels, and mention your device and Android version.
Pen pressure testers needed
If you have a Kindle Scribe or a Kobo with a stylus, please try the fountain and calligraphy pens and tell me how the pressure feels. Too light, too heavy, slow to react? A screenshot of Test pen and touch with your comment would be perfect.
For developers
- The code passes luacheck, and about 4,000 automated checks run on every push, many of them on KOReader’s real drawing, zip and network code.
- There’s a changelog in the repo now, covering every version since the first.
Download: Ink Away 4.0.0 on GitHub
It’s also available through the KOReader AppStore/Storefront plugins.
As always, thanks to everyone who tested, commented and sent videos, screenshots and bug reports. A lot of this release came straight from your feedback.
If you run into anything, let me know and I’ll take a look right away. Hope you enjoy it!
PS: Last time I said we’d take on Procreate with layers and new brushes. Both made it into this one.