NotateIt Viewer Remake

A modern, cross-platform viewer and extractor for the old, proprietary NotateIt (.nat) presentation format.

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About

NotateIt Viewer Remake is a feature-rich tool designed to rescue and interact with .nat files—an old, unsupported, and proprietary presentation format originally created for NotateIt.

Built with Python and PySide6, this remake offers both a user-friendly graphical interface with a dedicated presentation mode and a powerful command-line interface (CLI) for parsing and exporting embedded assets (images and text) into standard JSON format.

Features

• Interactive GUI: Easily navigate through slides. Double-click to inspect text blocks and images.
• Presentation Mode: Distraction-free, fullscreen presentation viewing with keyboard navigation.
• Data Rescue (CLI Extractor): Headless extraction of internal text and embedded PNGs to structured JSON files.
• Asset Exporting: Instantly copy text to your clipboard or save embedded images directly to your disk.
• Cross-Platform: Works seamlessly on Windows, macOS, and Linux (including NixOS support).

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Installation

1. From PyPI (Recommended)

You can install the viewer and its dependencies directly via pip. Python 3.10+ is required.

pip install notateit

2. Pre-compiled Binaries (Standalone)

If you don't have Python installed, you can download pre-compiled standalone executables from the GitHub Releases:

• Windows (.exe): Download NotateitViewerRemake.exe
• Linux (AppImage): Download NotateIt_Viewer_Remake-x86_64.AppImage

3. Nix / NixOS

The repository includes a flake.nix for declarative development and usage on Nix-based systems:

# Run directly from GitHub
nix run github:ndenissov/notateit

# Or drop into a development shell
nix develop

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Usage

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Simply run the application from your terminal. You can optionally pass the path to a .nat file to open it immediately:

notateit
# or
notateit path/to/presentation.nat

Command-Line Interface (CLI) Extraction

NotateIt includes a built-in extractor to unpack the proprietary .nat files into raw assets and a readable JSON structure without opening the GUI.

notateit path/to/presentation.nat --extract --output ./extracted_assets

CLI Arguments:

• input: Path to the input .nat file.
• -x, --extract: Enable extraction mode.
• -o, --output: Target directory for extracted .png files and the final .json map.
• -m, --minimize: Output minified JSON (removes indentation to save space).

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Keyboard Shortcuts

NotateIt is designed for efficiency. Here are the default keybindings available in the GUI:

Action	Shortcut	Context
Open File	Ctrl + O	Global
Close File	Ctrl + X	Global
Next Slide	Shift + N	Main Window
Previous Slide	Shift + P	Main Window
Start Presentation	F5	Main Window
Minimize / Exit	Esc	Presentation Mode / Main Window
Inspect Object	Ctrl + Enter	When an image or text block is focused
Copy Text	Ctrl + C	When a text block is focused
Save Image	Ctrl + S	When an image block is focused

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Contributing

Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome. Feel free to check out the issues page. If you're modifying the code, we recommend using poetry for dependency management:

poetry install
poetry run notateit

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Developed by Nikita Denissov