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Sending to reMarkable

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Mitchell Scott edited this page Jul 7, 2025 · 4 revisions

Overview

There are a few ways to sync content to reMarkable tablets, and they each have pros and cons. I'll outline the options I investigated, and what I've tried.

Option 1 : Native Cloud Sync

Pros:

  • No software to install on the tablet.
  • No Linux/SSH knowledge required.
  • Tools exist to interact with the cloud: rmapi
  • Support for replacing only the content of a PDF was recently added to rmapi.

Cons:

  • Requires using either reMarkable's cloud, or your own rmfakecloud instance.

This is the option I moved to after contributing PDF replacement support to rmapi. I've added a Docker image that bundles Ephemeris and the rmapi binary: ghcr.io/rmitchellscott/ephemeris:rmapi or ghcr.io/rmitchellscott/ephemeris:1.5.2-rmapi if you want to pin to a specific version. Here's the post-hook I'm using:

APP_POST_HOOK=rmapi put --content-only output/ephemeris.pdf

Option 2 : SSH

Pros:

  • No cloud needed.
  • No software to install on the tablet.
  • Can replace PDF content only.
  • Tools exist (such as resync.py) that can do this type of sync.

Cons:

  • Tablet has to be on the same network as the "pushing" service.
  • Tablet has to be powered on when the "pushing" service runs.
  • Requires at least basic knowledge of how to connect to the tablet via SSH.

Option 3 : Syncthing

Pros:

  • I can hit my home Syncthing instance from anywhere in the world.
  • The actual sync is a "pull" from the tablet, it doesn't have to be online when the PDF is updated to get the latest copy.
  • Only the PDF is swapped out. Annotations and metadata are preserved across updates.
  • No reMarkable cloud services needed

Cons:

  • Requires a syncthing server set up somewhere
  • Requires installing 3rd party software on the tablet, a bit of Linux skill.

I previously used remarkable_syncthing to sync only the PDF changes to and from the tablet directly before rmapi added support for swapping the PDF content.

If you're interested in a similar setup, I'll provide the broad strokes of what I did here, I'm not responsible for anything you do to your tablet along the way:

  1. Installed and setup a syncthing server.
  2. Installed Entware on the reMarkable tablet.
  3. Installed remarkable_syncthing via opkg and followed the setup docs in the repo.
  4. Generated my first Ephemeris PDF and sync it to the tablet normally via the reMarkable desktop app
  5. SSH'd into the tablet and get the doc's UID:
grep -iFl "visibleName" ~/.local/share/remarkable/xochitl/*.metadata  | xargs grep -iF "Ephemeris" | cut -d: -f1 | sed -E 's|.*/([^.]+)\.metadata$|\1|'
  1. Configured syncthing to sync the ~/.local/share/remarkable/xochitl/ directory, using the UID in an inverted ignore pattern to only sync that single document's content:
!**/c84b3d72-1f7f-4e38-a7ef-8e0ea3a48627
.pdf
*
  1. Configured Ephemeris to output this filename to the syncthing directory on my server.

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