Rnote for Teaching — Custom Art Brushes, Projection Mode & Zone Recording Successfully Implemented

[vikimaxton]

🎨 A customized Rnote build for teaching

I’ve been developing a customized version of Rnote focused specifically on digital teaching, handwriting, drawing, and screen-recording workflows.

The goal is not to turn Rnote into a general-purpose drawing application, but to make it a practical and distraction-free teaching tool.

✨ What has been implemented

🖌️ Art Brush Engine

I integrated additional artistic brushes into the existing Rnote brush system, inspired by the behavior of brushes found in applications such as Drawpile.

The current implementation includes quick-select artistic brushes such as:

• Watercolor
• Airbrush
• Pencil
• Ink
• Marker
• Chalk
• Pastel
• Charcoal
• Other expressive brushes

The emphasis is on select-and-draw simplicity rather than exposing a huge number of technical brush parameters to the teacher.

🖥️ Projection / Teaching Mode

A dedicated projection-oriented workflow has been added to make the canvas suitable for teaching on a second display or pen display.

The intention is to keep the teaching canvas clean while still providing quick access to the tools required during a lesson.

🎥 Recording Zones

I also implemented a zone-based recording system.

Instead of recording the entire desktop, the teacher can define a specific area of the Rnote canvas to record.

This makes it possible to:

• Record only the relevant teaching area
• Keep other UI elements outside the recording
• Create focused instructional videos
• Reuse the same canvas while recording different sections

🔍 Zoom Effects for Recorded Zones

The recording workflow is also being extended toward predefined zooming and panning effects.

The idea is to allow a recorded teaching zone to dynamically zoom into important parts of the canvas and then return to the wider view, making the final lesson more engaging without requiring complicated video editing.

🎯 Why I’m building this

My primary use case is teaching, especially situations where handwriting, diagrams, equations, and freehand explanations are more effective than traditional presentation slides.

The overall direction is:

Open-source digital whiteboard + artistic drawing tools + focused teaching recording workflow

I’m trying to keep the interface simple enough that a teacher can concentrate on teaching rather than managing software.

🚧 Current development

The core systems are now working together in my current build, and I’m continuing to refine:

• Recording and playback behavior
• Zoom/pan transitions
• Large preview rendering
• Multi-display behavior
• Windows display-scaling compatibility
• Overall teaching-oriented UI/UX

There are still some platform-specific rendering issues being investigated, particularly around Windows display scaling and secondary pen-display configurations.

🙏 Sharing this with the Rnote community

I wanted to share the progress because these modifications are pushing Rnote toward a workflow that I think could be useful for teachers, lecturers, tutors, and anyone who uses a pen display for explanation and recording.

Rnote has already provided an excellent foundation for this project, and I’m building these features on top of its existing architecture rather than creating a separate application from scratch.

I’d be interested to hear what the community thinks about this direction, particularly regarding the teaching workflow and the artistic brush integration.

[minnten]

Hello,

I would be interested in testing your version, where do you have the code, can I get a copy?
It would fit my need perfectly.

Greetings
Minnten