Bamboo Paper is a free application by Wacom that acts like a notebook for writing down with a stylus or pen. It is available on Windows 10 (through the Windows Store) and Android. The main design principle of this application is to mimic a real notebook, like the fieldnotes books.
Features of note:
- You to create and maintain multiple notebooks in the application. Each notebook can be assigned name, a color for the notebook cover and a paper type (plain, horizontal ruled, vertical ruled, grid and dotted grid). The paper type will apply to all pages you create in the notebook.
- Every notebook can be exported to a Wacom Ink Layer Language (.wll) file or a PDF file. They can also be printed, so you could export to PDF in that way too.
- In the Windows application, there does not seem to be a way to sync these files to my Wacom account.
- An open notebook displays two pages at a time, just like an open fieldnotes book. The size of the pages is fixed and cannot be changed. You can zoom in and out if you want to write or draw at a finer resolution.
- You are provided a felt pen and a highlighter - quite enough to take notes. If you want a pencil, paintbrush or other instruments, those are paid features.
What I liked:
- Wacom’s translation of my strokes to smooth ink lines is gorgeous. Other apps would introduce lots of jitter into the translated strokes. This is probably this application’s best feature - just how beautiful their ink translation is.
- I like that pages have a finite size. Unlike applications like OneNote that allow infinite length pages, I actually prefer to have page separation. The main reason for this is that exporting infinite length page to PDF pages ends up chopping content at odd places.
What I did not like:
- While the application allows export to .wll files, I wish it behaved like a traditional application and allowed me to keep the notebooks as .wll files natively. I cannot remember to export to .wll every time I edit a notebook.
- While I liked that the pages have a finite size, I wanted to set the size to something I like: A4.