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Comment by myu701 | Hacker News Reader

Does LibreOffice have an answer to OneNote style documents? I know for a while in MS Office 97 there were obscure optional tools like Binder (that I used the fool out of ) and Equation Editor (that I never opened) - does LibreOffice have the same sort of thing?

Ever since Onenote 2010 got its cloud sync killed by MS when they deprecated cookie auth in January of this year, I'm trapped with Office 2016 and looking for replacement virtual 3-ring binder / organizer software that supports text, images, file attachments.

I am not going to OneNote UWP app or O365 for the same reason I am not trying Notion, the data is not on my computer.

I have a personal DokuWiki that I use for its purposes, but it does not support WYSIWYG or instant image/copy paste, audio recording etc.

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I think https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

Is most like what you are asking for? Haven't used it but I've heard people say happy things.

Even has a flatpak -

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.xournalpp.xourna...

This looks great, and I plan to try it out. Looks like a FOSS competitor to Windows Journal but much better.

It does not (at least based on reading the readme and looking at the feature list) support pasting images, file attachments, or audio recordings, so I can' t directly migrate to it from OneNote but it certainly has handled the hard part (inking system on pages, saved to a local filesystem) and the PDF markup feature looks nifty.

"""Audio recording and playback alongside with handwritten notes"""

"""enhanced support for image insertion"""

I think they are working on a new file format and those sound like features that might be gated on that.

"""We are currently introducing a new file format that can efficiently store attached PDF files and other attachments internally. We will still allow for attachments that are linked to external files. Please refer to #937 for futher details."""

Wow, you aren't kidding! I will start watching the Github repo for that with interest.

https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/issues/937

Feb 25 2019 -> The main issue on he fileformat is, that it's not possible to embedded resources like PDFs, Audio Files, Images etc.

A new application: https://github.com/blackhole89/notekit/ A more mature one: https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

I know none of the ones mentioned match OneNote completely.

CherryTree has some cool features. It's great to have a little tree on the side, too.

Apps like these (and other less-open example is NoteCase Pro) used to be my primary tool for information organization. I eventually moved to "files and folders containing whatever media I need" along with desktop-level keyboard shortcuts and buttons for navigating them and scripts for managing various aspects. This had the advantage of helping me work with the grain of my file system, so integrating various third-party apps or scripts into my workflow became dead simple.

The centralized software package approach was always unique and interesting (still is) but was also either too difficult to migrate (de facto lock-in, even when export filters were included) or otherwise fell out of development / support across a 20 year timespan.

Occasionally I make a new web page when the level of depth or applicability warrants it. HTML documents have been surprisingly resilient when used as notebooks. Even just a set of hyperlinks practically becomes its own specialized app when organized toward a specific purpose.

I haven't seen anything in the LibreOffice suite but I'd like to see one too. Something like Joplin is the closest I've seen. But I'm on the hunt for something similar for my personal files

Another alt is Notable. It's just Markdown so it can't do the fancy stuff that OneNote does, but your files are just .mk files that you can sync with whatever device you want.

I'm still having a hard time switching from Evernote, though. It's just got too many years of me jotting things down that I can Ctrl-Q and find. My organization is an absolute mess though and it feels wrong to import all that garbage into one of these more modern apps.

Thanks for suggesting this. Notable's focused feature set and open file format reminds me of the ethos behind NoteWiki, which is an ancient win32 program that is basically a glorified notepad window that converts camelCased words to hyperlinks, and when clicked, creates a new text file with that name and opens the editor page to that file.

I used Zim (https://zim-wiki.org/manual/Help/Notebooks.html) for a while and found it useful.

Thanks for posting this.

Zim looks to be a good self-hosted alternative to my dokuwiki instance, but as it lacks embedding images, file attachments, ink support, it's not quite there.

You can embed images and attach files using the plugins. https://zim-wiki.org/screenshots.html

But yeah, definitely not as feature full as Onenote.

If you're looking for ink support, I've messed with Xournal and it's pen support was good.

Joplin maybe https://joplinapp.org/

This looks very, very close! I may end up trying it as it seems I may be looking into a 'perfect is enemy of good' situation here.

This does not support handwriting / free-inking AFAICT but does have a very promising feature set:

* save to local sqlite

* desktop, terminal, mobile app

* E2EE

* Portable app for USBs

* WebDAV sync

* Dropbox, Evernote sync

* File attachments, and if they are images, the images are rendered

Yeah I was quite impressed myself. I’ve searched a long time for worthwhile Evernote alternatives and this looks quite promising indeed.

I don’t mind paying for Evernote, but its options for backup and export are not impressive.

[Edited/extended]

You can still save locally with Office 2019/O365. You can change the default save location to local hard drive and ignore the cloud options.

Onenote 2016 supports local notebooks. Microsoft gave up on killing it and even updated it recently and added it back to Office 2019 (although its still called 2016) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/office-365-blog/your-...

Possibly related: Word used to have a note taking mode that allowed you to have an audio recording synced with your document such that audio could be played back from the point in time at which the line was written to help with transcription and such: does LibreOffice or an alternative to that exist? I don't have as much use for it now that I'm no longer a student, but it was a huge help in school.

Have you tried TeXmacs? It probably can do what you want to do and more. The concept is basically active structural document but the "active" part is quite advanced where you can execute other programs for examples spreadsheet or computer algebra software seamlessly from inside a document and display the output in the document itself.

We Sync to a network drive with one note. Can you mount a cloud drive ?

I have been contemplating ripping the onenote notebook out of OneDrive and onto the local file system, then using syncthing to sync it between my various devices.

While this solution will let me get back to business with OneNote 2010, I am still only buying myself time since long-term, I want to be using FOSS software or at least an open format file format like Sqlite.

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