How to Draw Layers on Your Supernote E-Reader Device

Feb 18, 2022

I love my Supernote devices and I don’t keep my praise a secret! For one thing, the company behind them, Ratta, is one of the most responsive teams I’ve ever encountered in the tech world. These guys care about their product and their users, and that care shows. Rather than just another faceless corp, you know that you’re connecting with an old-school company that takes pride in its work and customer relationships.

Supernote offers one of the best e-reader experiences on the market today, but where it shines brightest is as a note-taking system. By far, this is the best device I’ve used, outstripping even the much-vaunted Remarkable 2 (this is especially true in terms of business model and features, and with the Supernote boasting comparable writing latency to the Remarkable even more-so ).

My Supernote A5X proved invaluable in helping me prepare for my move to a new apartment and plan my layout!

Currently, the Supernote boasts support for four-active and one background layer, for a total of five layers. This is vital for anyone who wants to create diagrams and plans using their Supernote, and offers artists a much greater degree of flexibility and control over their work.

For my own part, my Supernote A5X proved invaluable in helping me prepare for my move to a new apartment and plan my layout! The Supernote is also a great way to represent battle-maps for D&D adventures if you want to play while you’re out and about. Use your A6X for your notes and character sheets, and your A5X for your playing board!

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Background layer on Supernote

The background layer is reserved for the page template of your choice. This could be something preloaded, like a grid, or could be something that you imported from an outside platform. You can toggle the visibility of this layer on or off as needed.

To set a new background layer (or remove it), just tap on the background layer itself in the layers list. It will automatically bring up the background layer selection screen.

Adding new layers to Supernote

Adding a new layer is easy, just click the layer menu and then the little plus icon ("+"). You can add up to four of these layers above the background layer. If you have more than one layer, you can move them forward or back easily with the arrow icons, and you can toggle visibility as well.

Best practices for layers with Supernote

As of this writing, Supernote does not yet support locking or grouping of sections of a layer. That means that if you are designing an apartment, and you place an armchair and a desk in one layer close together, when you draw a selection box around one part or all of the other may be selected as well. I’d love to see grouping as a function in the future, but, for now, you can use the layer feature to enforce simple grouping.

For instance, you can place different types of furniture on different layers to ensure that you can select and move specific drawn objects without accidentally dragging along others as well.

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