Is there anything to read and hand-annotate a pdf like on paper on a touchscreen with stylus?

I have a DELL touchscreen convertible and I would like to be able to read, but also annotate with a stylo like I am used on paper, a pdf, so to say bye bye to paper.

I can't find any PDF reader however that fulfil my needs. Ideally the reader would:

• have just a few buttons to manage settings (colour, width, erase..) of the pensil and leave the rest of the area for the pdf content
• once the pencil is selected stay with it (no okular), no need to select it again and again for any "line"
• have a dark mode as Evince
• (optional) keep the file format as an annotated PDF
• have some basic touch gestures like switching page, zoom, exit full screen
• when the pencil is recognised, disable the touch with the hand (if I write on the screen with the pencil, I don't want that the side of my hand makes lots of other sign on the screen)

I have tried Xournal, Scribus, pdfstudioviewer, Okular and a few more, but none is really usable for the task I am looking for. I never had a dedicated book reader, but maybe that is instead the solution to go ? What do you think ?

Solution 1:

Xournal++ is a feature-rich hand note-taking software:

Xournal++ is an cross-platform, open source, hand note-taking software with the target of flexibility, functionality, and speed. It is a modern rewrite and more feature-rich version of the wonderful Xournal program.

Features:

• Pressure-sensitive styluses and digital pen tablets (e.g. Wacom, Huion, XP Pen, etc. tablets).
• Plugins support via the Lua programming language.
• Customizeable toolbar, with multiple configurations, e.g. to optimize toolbar for portrait / landscape.
• "Paper" backgrounds for notetaking, scratch paper, or whiteboarding.
• Different pen types (e.g. eraser, highlighter) and stroke styles (e.g. solid, dotted).
• Different shapes, such as lines, arrow, circle, rectangle, splines.
• Shape resizing and rotation.
• LaTeX support (requires a working LaTeX install).
• Multiple "layers" for easier control over overlapping notes and strokes.
• Sidebar with page previews and PDF Bookmarks.
• Audio recording and playback alongside with handwritten notes.
• Rotation and grid snapping.
• Annotate on top of PDFs.
• Export to a variety of formats including SVG, PNG, and PDF.
• Multi language support (over 20 languages supported, with more added by the community!).

More info: https://xournalpp.github.io/

Xournal++ is also available from the snap store. You can install it like so:

sudo snap install xournalpp

It allows you to customize toolbars from the view menu so you can have a simple interface like this in the full screen mode:

Or even simpler custom interface by dragging and dropping adding / removing tools like so:

So that you only have the tools you need like so: