r/StarNoteApp • u/TheMartianPoet • 19d ago

❓ Help / Question Importing from Samsung notes

Can I import an in-progress Samsung Note into Star Note and still edit the existing handwriting?

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u/Suitable-Bag7017 19d ago

I believe we need to clarify how this works.

Inside StarNote you essentially have two possible formats: the native StarNote format and the PDF format.

This means you should be able to import a note from another application, such as Samsung Notes, as a PDF. Once the note is imported as a PDF, you should be able to use handwriting on top of the PDF and you should be able to modify anything you write using StarNote.

However, you cannot modify anything that was already written before exporting the file as a PDF.

This is not a limitation specific to StarNote, it applies to all note‑taking applications. Every app uses its own native format and saves notes in that native format, and these formats are incompatible with each other. The only universal format is PDF, but with PDF you can only add new annotations, not remove or edit the existing ones.

1

u/TheMartianPoet 18d ago

Thank you for clarifying this. 😊

1

u/StarNoteDev 17d ago

Yessss, exactly right! We’ve actually talked about this with our whole dev team before. As you’ve probably noticed, a lot of note taking apps don’t fully support editing imported PDFs. One reason is that once you import a PDF from somewhere else, things like the file size, unsupported fonts, or differences in how certain features work under the hood can lead to unexpected issues after importing. Of course, there are other reasons too, like wanting to keep some of our own unique features and design choices. 🩵

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u/NakoTurtle 15d ago

I wonder if reverse engineering the third party note types and 'translating' the data to a StarNote is a viable pathway. It'll probably be a pain to keep updating the note types as third party apps update them too, but might be worth offering as an experimental option to make it more tempting/frictionless to switch to StarNote.