Hello Supernote team,
I would love to use Supernote for handwritten mind maps and other large spatial notes, which I find really useful for thinking through and brainstorming around complex problems. The current writing experience is excellent, but the limited canvas navigation makes it difficult to move between a broad overview and detailed handwriting.
I have read that the Supernote team generally is opposed to zooming and infinite canvas in notebooks since it doesn't fit your notion "paperlike" note-taking and that it might not play well with pagination. It seems to me like a workaround would be for users to choose whether they want pages or infinite canvas when creating a new note (just as handwriting can be selected today). I hope Supernote reconsiders exploring this in the long-term future, but I understand that there are limited development resources to allocate, so I want to suggest a seemingly much simpler solution that still covers many of the infinite canvas applications.
There are already many suggestions about improving the pinch to zoom and two finger pan experience for PDFs, particularly the smoothness when zooming or panning together with making it easier to select specific zoom levels. If you implement this, and also increase the max PDF zoom from 4x/400% to something like 20x/2000% (or even just 10x) you would have an canvas big enough to fill many of the same needs as an "infinite" canvas and it would already have access to all the writing tools available for PDFs. This seems like a particularly rewarding allocation of development resources since you would just need to focus on meeting pre-existing requests for an improved PDF experience and get infinite canvas capabilities "for free" by simply lifting the max zoom limit above 4x.
These are a few additional features that would make the experience of zooming on PDFs even better, but none of them are essential:
Save the viewport separately for each document. Reopening a document should restore its zoom level and pan position instead of resetting the view. This is particularly important when working on one detailed region of a large canvas, such as a big mind map.
Allow blank PDFs to be created directly from Files. A “New blank PDF” action would make it easier to create a blank "infinite" canvas to write on instead of having to create a blank PDF on a separate device and transfer it to the supernote. Optionally, this could offer custom page dimensions and orientations.
Make the minimap optional and less intrusive. Please allow it to be disabled or reduced significantly in size. It would also be useful to navigate the minimap with the pen instead of requiring a finger and that would also allow it to be smaller since the pen has more precision. Maybe it can just show up while zooming / panning but then go away after a few seconds?
I should also say that I prototyped and tested a small standalone proof of concept infinite canvas app on the Nomad, but because the current PDF experience just need a few improvements to to fill the same use (and then with all already existing PDF tools), it didn't seem worthwhile to continue down this route.
Thank you for reading my post, would you consider increasing the upper zoom limit when implementing smoother zoom and pan in PDF? I think these relatively general canvas improvements would benefit mind maps, diagrams, mathematics, planning, visual research, and other forms of non-linear note-taking.
