PDF to Editable Remarkable Notebook (Mac OS)

pdf_rmN.md

Converting a PDF to an editable reMarkable Notebook

Use case: Working with PDF text books, it can be helpful to be able to extract problems and images to use in notes and when working problemsets on the reMarkable tablet.

These instructions are MacOS centric, but should be reproducable on most platforms as the tools are fairly platform agnostic.

Requirements

• homebrew - package manager for installing components
• DrawJ2d - Convert PDF to remarkable notebook (rmn) format
  • Java JRE 1.8 - required by DrawJ2d
• pdf2rmnotebook - combine multiple rmn pages into notebook
  • poppler
• Method for syncing RMN files to tablet
  • rmapi - CLI browser/interface for remarkable web platform
  • RCU - Desktop client for moving files directly to remarkable
• PDFsam Basic - Extract pages by page number from PDF

Setup

Setup DrawJ2d

The DrawJ2d executable/script needs to be available in $PATH

1. Download and install Java JRE 1.8
2. Download DrawJ2d
3. Create ~/bin dirctory (or any other path): mkdir -p ~/bin
4. Add the ~/bin to PATH
   • Edit ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc and add :$HOME/bin to the existing $PATH
5. Test: $ drawj2d -V - The output should be similar to that shown below

$ drawj2d -V

            Welcome to Drawj2d
            Copyright (c) A. Vontobel, 2014-2023
            Version 1.32

Setup pdf2rmnotebook

1. Install poppler dependency for pdfinfo: brew install poppler
2. Clone pdf2rmnotebook
   • git clone git@github.com:JCN-9000/pdf2rmnotebook.git
3. Copy pdf2rmnotebook executable and libaries to ~/bin
   • cp pdf2rmnotebook.sh ~/bin; cp -R var ~/bin/

Setup rmapi or RCU

rmapi

1. Download rmapi Mac OS version
2. Decompress and move rmapi into ~/bin
3. run rmapi and follow the prompts to generate an access key

RCU

1. Pay for & download RCU

Setup PDFsam

1. Download PDFsam Basic
2. Move into Applications folder

Workflow

Extract Pages

Use PDFsam to extract pages. Extract the pages you wish to be able to cut and paste from in a reMarkable notebook. Save the pages to a folder.

Convert PDF to rmapi compatable zip

Use pdf2rmnotebook to convert the PDF files to RMN zip files:

pdf2rmnotebook.sh -o output_name input.pdf

Convert PDF to RCU compatible rmn

Use pdf2rmnotebook to convert the PDF files to RMN zip files:

[Forked version that supports RMN natively]((https://github.com/txoof/pdf2rmnotebook/tree/readme)

pdf2rmnotebook.sh -r -o output_name input.pdf

Transfer RMN

rmapi: rmapi put /path/to/file

RCU: connect, drag, drop

Using rmapi means that anybody who uses this workflow will have to have a reMarkable cloud account. I don't trust the reMarkable cloud service, so I can't/won't use it.

Instead, I use drawj2d to export to an .rmn file, and use RCU to upload it to the tablet.

Thanks. I added RCU as an option to the workflow.