Noteful
- Pricing Noteful requires a small one-time purchase ($5 when when I bought it, circa 2024).
- Alternatives Notability - Notability provides more AI features than Noteful, including handwriting-to-text conversion, speech transcription, and automatic generation of study notes. It comes with a significantly higher price tag as a result. Notability also offers a feature for publishing notes online, which can be useful for sharing lecture notes with students.
After trying many PDF annotation apps for iPad, I finally settled on Noteful. Despite being the cheapest among the contenders, Noteful stands out for being exceptionally well-designed with several features that other apps often lacked:
- Drawing layers that can be enabled and hidden.
- Document outlines are automatically populated from PDF outlines, resulting in easy navigation.
- (Nearly) infinity zooming, so that you can read tiny details and make precise modifications.
- Customizable pen settings allow you to configure the appearance of your handwriting to your desired level of smoothing and pressure sensitivity.
- Page tags allow you to tag content on a given page for later reference.
- Stickers allow you to save and re-use an annotation;
Noteful does have a few downsides:
- No handwriting recognition, so it can be hard to search for content in handwritten notes.
- No audio transcriptions.
- When notes are backed up to a cloud service, such Google Drive, notes are organized by tags instead of by folder.