Create Your Own Papers

In addition to the Papers available in the Paper Shop, you can also create unique Penultimate papers from any image to fit your note-taking needs. Here’s how it’s done:

1. First, take a photo or scan an image of a blank document you’d like to use as the background of your paper. Then, save it to the Camera Roll on your iPad.
2. Inside any Penultimate Notebook, tap the Papers icon on the top right corner of your screen. Hit the (+) sign, then Continue to add a new Paper.
3. Select the image you’d like to create your Paper from, and name the Paper whatever you would like.
4. Click on your custom Paper to start writing or drawing, just as you normally would. It will now be the default Paper when you create new pages in your current notebook. If you switch Papers or Notebooks and then want to return to the last selection, you can find it in My Papers.

Bonus: To add this paper to Penultimate on your iPad, open the link to this shared note, then tap and hold the .ppr file and tap “Open in Penultimate.”

Any form, diagram, or template that you frequently reference is now synced to all your devices and searchable at a moment’s notice. Custom Papers are a just another way that Penultimate and the rest of Evernote’s apps make getting organized around your projects easy and fun, no matter what information you need to keep track of in your work or daily life.

What kinds of handwritten notes do you take with Penultimate? Share your story in the comments below!

I’m Ben, the creator of Penultimate, and today I’m proud to announce that Penultimate is becoming part of the Evernote family. Penultimate is the best and best-selling handwriting app for iPad. Evernote is a company whose mission is to help you “remember everything,” with a popular and powerful service for creating notes of all kinds and making them searchable and findable anywhere. They have a longstanding commitment to handwriting recognition — members of the core Evernote team have been building handwriting technology since the Apple Newton (really). Penultimate already offers basic Evernote integration, and tons of people are right now using Evernote’s recognition, search, and organization for their Penultimate notes.

Realizing that Evernote and Penultimate have such obviously complementary technologies, we’re teaming up. Evernote has acquired Penultimate, and I’ll be joining Evernote to help bring their significant resources to bear on making Penultimate better, faster. You’ll also start seeing Penultimate (finally!) on other devices, and we’ll be bringing great handwriting into other parts of Evernote.

Importantly, Penultimate is not going away: it remains an independent application, and will continue to espouse the virtues of ease of use, elegance, and “that special something” that have kept you coming back. But I also think you’ll be thrilled, and even surprised, by how much more the app will be able to do for you as we work together to improve it and connect more profoundly with Evernote’s capabilities.

Penultimate has come a long way since its launch as the original dedicated handwriting app for Apple’s first iPad two years ago. It now offers scores of powerful features within that same accessible and attractive design. It’s remained a top-selling app, and millions of people have showed us that they’re doing things with Penultimate we never imagined. I’ve been amazed and humbled by all of the passionate users I’ve encountered — you have offered your valuable feedback, support, and candid (!) critiques. Penultimate would not be what it is without you. I believe that this partnership makes a lot of sense, and Penultimate is only going to get better from here. Not just incrementally better, but WAY better, and quickly. I’m excited about the future of the app, and I sincerely hope that you will be too.