Notion
Personal reading library with AI handwriting conversion and PDF assistance.
A personal reading library that converts photographs of handwritten notes into clean digital text, built to replace the notebooks that could not travel. It later absorbed a reader for PDF and EPUB: uploading a book, holding page position, asking questions about the current page, summarizing sections and saving notes all happen without leaving the document.
Problem
Reading material was split across places that could not talk to each other. Handwritten notebooks held the best thinking, PDFs lived in separate readers, and getting AI help meant copying text into a third tool. The three needed one workspace.
Solution
A Notion-style reading workspace: a Tiptap block editor for notes, book pages, Supabase auth and sync, and handwriting conversion that sends photographed pages to Qwen 2.5 VL through OpenRouter and returns Markdown, optionally split per page or auto-chaptered.
The reader came out of ReadBuddy, an earlier standalone experiment, though the code was rebuilt rather than ported — ReadBuddy ran entirely client-side against Gemini directly, while this version is Supabase-backed and routes through OpenRouter. Inside a PDF or EPUB:
- page position and progress are saved on every turn and restored on reopen - the assistant reads the current page text, plus any selection, as context - fixed actions cover summarize, key points, explain and simplify - answers can be saved straight into notes
Outcome
Twelve books digitized so far. Handwriting conversion gets the most use because it solved the original problem. Adding the reader moved the app past a notes database into a reading workflow where capture, reading and AI assistance stay attached to the book.
Features
- AI handwriting-to-text conversion
- Personal book notes library
- PDF reader with progress tracking
- Context-aware AI questions
- Section summaries and explanations
- Cross-device reading sync
Stack
- Frontend: React
- Backend: ExpressJs
- Other: AI