Scrybble remarks

With Remarks, you can export notebooks and PDFs from your ReMarkable.

Export your notebooks as PDF
Extract highlights as text

Goals

This is a fork of https://github.com/lucasrla/remarks. This fork has a few goals

Support ReMarkable v3
Support Type Folio output
Retain support for older ReMarkable versions
Note: This fork does not support all original output variants offered by the original remarks. The focus lies only on getting PDFs and text highlights out. You can use other tools such as Pandoc for conversion.

This project assumes familiarity with git, python and the commandline.

A visual example

Highlight and annotate PDFs

And then use remarks to export annotated pages to Markdown, PDF, PNG, or SVG on your computer:

WHAT IS LIFE?

Based on lectures delivered under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943

To the memory of My Parents

Installing Remarks

Linux is recommended, Windows should work too.

Install Python 3.10+ and Poetry

## Get remarks on your computer
git clone https://github.com/lucasrla/remarks.git && cd remarks
## Install the dependencies
poetry install

Using Remarks

To get remarks up and running on your local machine, follow the instructions below:

1. Copy reMarkable's "raw" document files to your computer

In order to reconstruct your highlights and annotations, remarks relies on specific files that are created by the reMarkable device as you use it. Because these specific files are internal to the reMarkable device, first we need to transfer them to your computer.

There are several options for getting them to your computer. Find below some suggestions. Choose whatever fits you:

Use rsync (i)
Check out the repository @lucasrla/remarkable-utils for the SSH & rsync setup I use (which includes automatic backups based on cron).
Use scp (i)
On your reMarkable tablet, go to Menu > Settings > Help, then under About tap on Copyrights and licenses. In General information, right after the section titled "GPLv3 Compliance", there will be the username (root), password and IP address needed for SSHing into it. Using these credentials, scp the contents of /home/root/.local/share/remarkable/xochitl from your reMarkable to a directory on your computer. (Copying may take a while depending on the size of your document collection and the quality of your WiFi network.) To prevent any unintented interruptions, you can (optionally) switch off the Auto sleep feature in Menu > Settings > Battery before transferring your files.
Use @juruen/rmapi or @subutux/rmapy
Both are free and open source software that allow you to access your reMarkable tablet files through reMarkable's cloud service.
Copy from reMarkable's official desktop application
If you have a reMarkable's official desktop app installed, most of the files we need are already easily available on your computer. For macOS users, the files are located at ~/Library/Application\ Support/remarkable/desktop. To avoid interfering with reMarkable's official app, copy and paste all the contents of ~/Library/Application\ Support/remarkable/desktop to another directory (one that you can safely interact with – say, ~/Documents/remarkable/docs). Please note that this method won't allow you to use remarks' EPUB functionality. That's because this directory doesn't seem to include the PDF files that reMarkable auto converts your EPUBs to.

Usage and Demo

Run remarks and check out what arguments are available:

# Alan Turing's 1936 foundational paper (with a few highlights and scribbles)

# Original PDF file downloaded from:
# "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem"
# https://londmathsoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230

python -m remarks demo/on-computable-numbers/xochitl remarks-example/

A few other examples:

# Assuming your `xochitl` files are at `~/backups/remarkable/xochitl/`

python -m remarks ~/backups/remarkable/xochitl/ example_1/

python -m remarks ~/backups/remarkable/xochitl/ example_2/

Tests

Run pytest in the root directory of the project after installing the dependencies using poetry. This will create files in the tests/out directory. The contents of this directory can safely be deleted.

Example:

python -m pytest -q remarks/test_initial.py

Credits and Acknowledgements

Scrybble A paid user-friendly service that helps non-technical ReMarkable users synchronize their notebooks to Obsidian. Financially supports @Azeirah to work on remarks.
lucasrla who wrote the original implementation of remarks
@JorjMcKie who wrote and maintains the great PyMuPDF
u/stucule who posted to r/RemarkableTablet the first account (that I could find online) about reverse engineering .rm files
@ax3l who wrote lines-are-rusty / lines-are-beautiful and also contributed to reverse engineering of .rm files
@edupont, @Liblor, @florian-wagner, and @jackjackk for their contributions to rM2svg
@ericsfraga, @jmiserez, @peerdavid, @phill777 and @lschwetlick for updating rM2svg to the most recent .rm format
@lschwetlick who wrote rMsync and also two blog posts about reMarkable-related software [1, 2]
@soulisalmed who wrote biff
@benlongo who wrote remarkable-highlights

For more reMarkable resources, check out awesome-reMarkable and remarkablewiki.com.

License

remarks is Free Software distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

Disclaimers

This is a hobby project of an enthusiastic reMarkable user. There is no warranty whatsoever. Use it at your own risk.

The author(s) and contributor(s) are not associated with reMarkable AS, Norway. reMarkable is a registered trademark of reMarkable AS in some countries. Please see https://remarkable.com for their products.

Azeirah/remarks