Operator and household · Explanation

How Inkhold works#

Inkhold splits the work in two. The server, at home, stores your files and answers the tablet. Your browser, on whatever device you hold, does everything that takes effort: drawing pages, searching, exporting. That split is why a Raspberry Pi from 2014 can serve a household.

The diagram shows who talks to whom: the tablet and the browser both talk to the one Inkhold program, which keeps everything on its own disk.

The server#

One program, listening on one port, for three things: the tablet’s sync (the same protocol Supernote’s own Private Cloud speaks), the browser app’s requests, and the browser app’s own files. It keeps a database and your files on its disk, and reaches nothing outside your home.

What the server does with a notebook is cheap: it reads where each page’s layers sit in the file, and the text the tablet recognised. It never draws a page.

The browser#

The browser app gets the bytes and does the rest with small WebAssembly decoders: it draws each page from the tablet’s own ink data, builds a search index from the recognised text and keeps it, and makes the PDFs and images you export. A busy evening costs the server little because the work happens on the devices people are already holding.

What follows#

• Speed depends more on your device than on the server.
• Privacy: the server has nobody to talk to; see Your data.
• Offline, the app opens and you can move through folders, but reading needs the server.