emsi/OneNoteViewer
Native Linux viewer and reusable parsing, rendering, and indexing APIs for OneNote notebooks - emsi/OneNoteViewer
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README
OneNote Viewer for Linux OneNote Viewer is a native Linux desktop application for opening, viewing, indexing, and searching local Microsoft OneNote notebooks. It reads the native .one and .onetoc2 data directly and reconstructs the OneNote freeform page canvas; HTML, Markdown, PDF, or another linear document format is never its canonical representation. It is deliberately read-only: source notebook files are never modified. Multiple notebook directories remain open together in one workspace, with the familiar notebook/section-group/section/page/canvas hierarchy and one search scope across all of them. This is a desktop viewer, not a converter or an import bridge to another notes application. The viewer is also a reference consumer of reusable components. Native OneNote parsing, page layout/scene construction, GTK rendering, and index/query behavior live behind documented library boundaries so other note-taking and knowledge-management software can render .one sections or find relevant OneNote pages without adopting the complete desktop application. This repository contains a working Rust/GTK implementation, its specifications and architecture decisions, and a versioned copy of the primary format references. The implementation is a functional pre-release baseline; it is not yet a broad format-compatibility or visual-fidelity claim. Install Flatpak is the primary release channel.
Download OneNote Viewer 0.1.1. Open the downloaded file with your software center and install it.
Alternatively, install it from a terminal opened in the download folder: flatpak install --user --or-update ./OneNoteViewer-0.1.1-linux-x86_64.flatpak Start OneNote Viewer from the desktop application menu. Flatpak and the Flathub repository must already be configured; the installation guide covers that setup, checksum verification, updates, removal, and the AppImage alternative. Open Notebooks Use the application menu to open a .one, .onetoc2, .onepkg, or notebook directory. Additional notebook directories join the same searchable workspace without being moved. Notebook folders copied under the configurable default notebooks location open automatically on the next launch. Screenshots Light Theme
Dark Theme
Scope The initial product:
automatically opens notebook folders under the configurable $XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR/OneNoteViewer default notebooks location; opens local notebook directories containing .onetoc2 and .one files; opens standalone .one sections; accepts .onepkg export packages through a one-time, managed extraction to a normal directory tree of .onetoc2 and .one files; reads both desktop revision-store files and locally downloaded FSSHTTP packaged files, without contacting OneDrive; renders source-native OneNote pages as a spatial, freeform canvas, preserving coordinates, overlap, sizes, backgrounds, ink, and object relationships; searches titles, text, tags, image alternative text, handwriting recognition text, link targets, and attachment names across all open notebooks; extracts attachments only after an explicit user action and opens them with the desktop's registered application.
Cloud synchronization, editing, collaboration, and executing embedded content are outside the initial scope. Export or conversion to HTML, Markdown, or PDF is also outside the viewer's load/render/index pipeline because it would discard or flatten the layout this project exists to preserve. Documentation Start with the master plan. It is the canonical entry point for project scope, deliverables, current status, execution order, and document authority. The supporting documents are:
Documentation map Technology decision Product requirements System architecture ONEPKG extraction decision Reusable component decision OneNote parsing profile Public integration API Persisted feature inventory Known limitations and risks Remaining release work Installation guide Packaging and release guide Roadmap and acceptance gates Reference provenance
Status Functional implementation baseline; compatibility and fidelity hardening are still in progress. The five-crate workspace now parses native notebook trees, performs bounded on-disk .onepkg extraction, builds UI-neutral page scenes, renders them in an embeddable GTK widget, transactionally indexes multiple sources, exposes a versioned JSON Lines query process, and composes those components into a persistent multi-notebook GTK viewer. The supplied private package passes extraction, all-section parse, all-page scene, indexing, search, standalone renderer, and full viewer Xvfb tests. The viewer navigation keeps notebooks, nested section groups, and sections in one collapsible tree, with a separately collapsible page list. Page title and creation time are shown once above the freeform body. Bundled symbolic action icons avoid a dependency on a particular host icon theme. The tested corpus is still one private desktop package. Accessibility, measured layout fidelity, hostile-input coverage, several user actions, refresh, and stable packaging remain release blockers. See remaining work for the exact gaps and completion evidence required. Repository Shape The code is a modular Cargo workspace: crates/ onenote-core/ Read-only domain model and parser adapter onenote-render/ UI-neutral page layout and retained scene onenote-render-gtk/ Embeddable GTK4 OneNote page widget onenote-index/ Rebuildable index and public query API onenote-viewer/ GTK4 desktop application/composition root docs/ Architecture, decisions, specifications, and plans fixtures/ Small redistributable synthetic notebooks packaging/ Flatpak and distribution metadata scripts/ Reproducible maintenance and validation commands
See the repository layout for ownership rules and dependency direction. Development Ubuntu 24.04 development requires Rust 1.85.1 and the GTK 4.14 development stack: sudo apt update sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libgtk-4-dev ./scripts/check-system-deps.sh cargo run -p onenote-viewer -- /path/to/notebook cargo test --workspace --all-targets libgtk-4-dev supplies the required Graphene, Pango, Cairo, GDK, and GSK development metadata. An unset PKG_CONFIG_PATH is normal for distribution packages. The standalone reusable renderer can be exercised with: cargo run -p onenote-render-gtk --example standalone -- /path/to/section.one See the packaging and release guide for local artifact builds and the tagged GitHub release workflow. Safety Baseline Notebook files are untrusted input. Current code canonicalizes sources, applies projection and payload limits, decodes images lazily with allocation ceilings, validates package paths, stages extraction privately, and publishes packages atomically. It never writes notebook sources. The SQLite index is disposable derived data under the user's XDG cache directory. Remaining hostile-input and external-action work is tracked explicitly rather than implied complete. Licensing OneNote Viewer is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The active OneNote parser fork and retained parser source remain available under MPL-2.0 and are additionally distributed under GPL-3.0-or-later as part of the combined application under MPL 2.0 section 3.3. Lucide and Feather-derived icons retain their ISC/MIT terms. Microsoft reference documents are not covered by the project GPL and retain their embedded terms. See third-party notices, the generated dependency license report, and corresponding-source information.