Carbo › Pencil Notes & Drawing Reviews

by Island Life

Carbo makes pretty good scans, but it’s crippled by the lack of a viable export option. Users need to be able to select multiple scans and export them to PDF or other file formats. Until that happens, save your money and consider this unusable for most purposes.

by UniqueNick95

Was hoping for same sketching engine as on Inko, but it isn’t. And with no demo version, no way for me to test without costing $8.

At this point, I won’t use CarboPencilNotesDrawing and wish I could get a refund.

by Johng04

7.99 for a below average pencil app. You do the math.

by Silvermoonbeam

Yes, there are tags, but for large collections of notes, tags are burdensome as they are applied on a per page basis. If there were a way to export a group of notes based on tags, this would be better.

As another reviewer mentioned, "export" options are limited. Why can't I work on the notes and then export an entire notebook as a discrete entity into some meaningful format, such as PDF? It looks like I'm going to have to dive into Dropbox and manually collate the pages into a notebook.

Perhaps it's my mistake, because I assumed this was an app to help one "process" notes. It turns out it's really an app to store notes in what is, in effect, a proprietary format.

by Eal111222333

CarboPencilNotesDrawing is decent at one thing: take a picture of some writing or drawings, and move parts of it around. There are better scanning apps, and there are better note-taking apps, all of which offer more robust organization and sharing options. Carbo does provide a simple, intuitive editing interface. If that is all you are looking for, this is CarboPencilNotesDrawing for you.

by ZC111

There's no edge-detection that's the standard for (free) scanning apps. You have to ponderously drag the corners to the edge of the document.
For lined paper (who doesn't use lined paper for taking notes?) CarboPencilNotesDrawing imports the lines and ties them to the text/images. This means that you can't lasso your text/images and manipulate them. You can reduce the line thickness when you first import the image to try to make the lines disappear but you run the risk of not capturing some of your written text/images.
I should note that the beta Evernote sync does not work.

by Natesterdawg

CarboPencilNotesDrawing is great. Currently, I'm using it as a cloud service to store all my notes for school. The only reason I'm giving three stars? Crashes. This apps experiences a lot of them. When you're inputting a large amount of things at one time (take school notes, for example) CarboPencilNotesDrawing seems to crash on quite a regular interval, which is not ideal in any situation. Do take note it doesn't take the straight image, the images are run through filters that you can choose. Also, CarboPencilNotesDrawing does not work well when using different writing utensils (pencil & pen) on one surface.

by Stever777

Carbo excels at letting me scan and reorganize my written notes. I use it to back up my handwritten notebooks. It’s really a nice little app, and once I can bundle my pages easily into a PDF, it will replace my other scanning app.

by Ajay.ganapathy

I use CarboPencilNotesDrawing to capture my whiteboard drawings all the time. It's got a great balance of capture and editing features. I can write on my whiteboard, and then tweak the images later on.

Apple Pencil support is great for CarboPencilNotesDrawing. It also supports all of the latest iOS features ... Except for iCloud Drive. I can't take my drawings and store them in iCloud Drive or other storage providers. I hope they add this in.

by OriginalSactobob

This should do a very nice job of getting rid of miscellaneous notes. I'll go to five stars when it syncs. Until then, items will stay local and I will only use on my iPhone. As it is, one chooses where to store in terms of local, Dropbox or iCloud --- and wherever chosen is the only place the photo is. As far as I could, there is not even a copy feature so that one could manually store both local and cloud.

by One*Kind

I got CarboPencilNotesDrawing when it was on sale. Now, it turned to an app that must be installed on every device I own. In-app editing makes CarboPencilNotesDrawing stand out from other apps, and the vector based images are almost perfect. However, there are some shortcomings, like filtering multiple tags or reediting scanned documents that sometimes can a bit annoying. I'm really anticipating for the new versions of CarboPencilNotesDrawing !

by Adr!anoob

Hi Developers, much appreciation for such a great app. I like it so far. And I have a suggestion. Because the drawings are turned into vectors, maybe you can add a function that allow users to select several vectors and then change their color or thickness. This can be used to highlight some part of the notes. I wonder if that would be difficult to do, but it would come very hand in day to day use.

by MaximeThePipou

CarboPencilNotesDrawing is really useful and really cool. I’m excited about this. My only problem is how I can’t save my notes as pictures to make them easy to share. “Create archive” is confusing and sending them in an email didn’t work and icloud and all that, I just don’t even know what I’m doing. Having the ability to use these notes as /pictures/ would be incredibly intuitive and would make CarboPencilNotesDrawing much more usable.

by Sy9308

I currently meet a problem that I can no longer sync my files to evernote. The error message says that "Evernote notebook could not be started (no information available for this error)" I tried to turn Evernote function off and then reauthorized Carbo, but this didn't work. I have experienced this problem for a period of time and the recent update didn't solve it.
I really appreciate your team for bringing such excellent app and I hope it could being better and better. Four star for the sync problem and I'm looking forward having this function back.

by Live And Grow

CarboPencilNotesDrawing can prove very helpful.

I have some old books that are not available in digital format. I can import some pages using Carbo and then read them and also underline and make marginal notes. This means that I can take the books with me and also that my underlining and notes does not have to damage the original book.

I think that I am going to like CarboPencilNotesDrawing; however, I have found one problem. There is an option for exporting pages (it is called "archiving"), but not of the options work. The archiving is basically just an "open in" setup, but since the file type is *.carbo, the files won't be read by any of my apps. So, CarboPencilNotesDrawing *can* export, but none of the apps on my device will accept them.

by TiPAB

I'm one of those people that literally hate taking notes on ruled paper. I draw diagrams, wife frames and other concepts in my notes. So CarboPencilNotesDrawing works perfectly for me.

Personally I store my "notebooks" in DropBox and I like the fact that it stores the files there and not on my device. This way it frees up my device from having pages and pages of notes on it.
The tagging platform is a bit quirky for my taste.

All the tags use lower case characters even if you try and enter all letters in CAPS. So, creating a tag such as "Super Cool Business" become "super cool business". It's annoying to me. So I knocked off a star for that.

I also technically knocked off a star for no PDF vector export. It's obvious that there is no pixelation in CarboPencilNotesDrawing , but the PDFs are exported using rasterized (non vector) images.

I understand why people aren't happy about ruled paper detection, but I believe CarboPencilNotesDrawing is aimed more at people that use un-9ruled paper (like myself).

by Shoobiedoo

The developers have managed to take a very complicated process and make it simple. This is a great utility for capturing images and then moving them around within the same document. It's perfect if you take notes freehand or draw diagrams and then have need to put all of those little things together into one page or a single document. I don't know of another app that can do this as easily or as quickly.

by BottleRocket_

I was worried when I saw that CarboPencilNotesDrawing went to a subscription plan, especially after losing functionality in other paid apps after they’ve done the same. Im happy to see that I haven’t lost any of the functionality of CarboPencilNotesDrawing and it still works great. Thanks!

by Jeremia1612

I enjoy using CarboPencilNotesDrawing for a variety of math applications. I can take pictures of different geometric figures and manipulate them the way I would like, and with the vast array of options such as changing the pen, paper etc. I can really make those things come to life for my students.

by Lucenvoyage

Carbo has long been my go to for scanning written notes. It’s clear and allows me manipulate the scan exactly as I want. Its export options work well. I haven’t used the pencil option much, but it has come in handy. As someone who prefers to write on paper then scan for long term reference it’s perfect for me and well worth the investment.