Handwriting in the Digital Age.

Carbo is an application for people who love handwriting. Just use your favorite pen and paper as you usually do, without any constraint. Carbo will let you capture, edit, and organize your notes, design sketches, and whiteboard drawings, bringing handwriting into the digital age.

New in Carbo 2: your digital notebook is now available on Mac, along with iPhone & iPad. Built on Mac Catalyst with Optimized for Mac technology (macOS 11 Big Sur), Carbo 2 brings a true Mac experience. Carbo now makes the most of each Apple device: iPhone can be used to capture notes on the go, iPad and Apple Pencil can be used to create notes on device, and finally the Mac is used to access, edit, and use these in a productive setup.


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Gorgeous & Amazingly Accurate.

Carbo introduces a unique pixel-free technology that preserves all the expressiveness of the original drawing. Carbo's hybrid capture and rendering method, halfway between bitmap and vector, allows gorgeous visualization of handwritten contents, especially on Retina displays.

You start by taking a picture of a note, and adjust its contrast. The processed notes only take a fraction of the storage requirement of the original image (typically ~400KB vs. ~2.5MB for the source JPEG), which means you can store 6x as many notes for a given storage quota. But, despite the small size, you'll still be able to generate full-fledged 1200 DPI exports when needed.
Carbo
Original



Editing at its Best.

Selection of some part of a note using the lasso tool
Notes are fully editable in Carbo. You can
  • lasso-select any element which can then be moved, scaled, or removed,
  • make lines thicker or thinner,
  • or use the provided eraser tool.
These editing tools all come with unlimited undo.

Moreover, editing is done with vector-like accuracy: scaling or rotating parts of the image won't reveal any pixels. This gives you unprecedented freedom to reorganize and cleanup handwritten assets.


Powerful Organizer.

View of the tags section
Carbo organizes your notes chronologically as you import them. But Carbo also lets you tag and annotate them for easy retrieval:
  • Meaningful tags can be set, that will help you search through all your notes.
  • Annotations can be added as well. These textual descriptions are archived along with the images, and are fully searchable.
Moreover, notes can be stored either on your device, or synced in the cloud, with native support for iCloud, Evernote, and Dropbox. You can then seamlessly access and edit them from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.


Drag & Drop and Apple Pencil.

Carbo supports modern iOS features, like Apple Pencil and Drag & Drop:
  • Drag & Drop lets you move notes to different notebooks (iCloud, Dropbox…), or tag them by dropping these on a specific tag. On iPad, Carbo even allows importing images and exporting notes to other apps to achieve an even more productive workflow.
  • Apple Pencil gets some refined support on iPad Pro. Carbo takes full advantage of the Apple Pencil’s impressive sampling rate (240Hz), prediction & correction capabilities for zero perceived lag, as well as pressure and angle sensitivity. These in turn enable more expressiveness for an amazing sketching experience.


Share with Style.

View of the blueprint export style
Lastly, you can turn your notes or sketches into beautiful creations using a variety of export styles. Choose among 7 handcrafted styles and their variations to customize your notes:
  • Blackboard/chalks combos
  • Blueprint
  • Paper with several pen styles…
Then share these notes with the world using Twitter, Facebook, AirDrop, Mail, Messages, iCloud Drive...



Apple Pencil

Carbo lets you capture and organize handwritten notes & sketches, bringing the whole calligraphy heritage into the digital era.

Carbo on Mac

View or edit your on the Mac with the Carbo Mac Catalyst app.

High-fidelity Exports

1200 DPI Black and White high-fidelity exports for printing purposes.

Innovative Pixel-less Rendering

Advanced image processing to clean up the picture. Turns the drawing into a accurate monochrome note preserving all expressiveness of the original image.

Smart Search

Filtering and searching by tags, or annotations will get you quickly to the note you are looking for.

Note Editing

Notes are fully editable. Tap to select part of the note, and then resize it, move it, change line thickness, or erase it.

See all features