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Sending to reMarkable

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Mitchell Scott edited this page Jun 24, 2025 · 4 revisions

Note

There will hopefully be changes merged to rmapi soon to enable my ideal case layed out below. Keep an eye on this repo and wiki if that method interests you.

Why Ephemeris Doesn't Solve This

There are a few ways to sync content to reMarkable tablets, and they have their compromises. I didn't want to pick a specific method, nor reinvent the wheel, so I've left this to the users to decide for themselves. I'll outline the options I've looked at so far, what I think my ideal solution would be, and what I'm doing currently myself.

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

Cons:

  • Cannot (with recent versions of the sync API) replace the underlying PDF content leaving metadata and annotations in place.
  • Replacing whole documents would be possible, but would require creating new and deleting old.
  • Requires using either reMarkable's cloud, or your own rmfakecloud instance.

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.

My Ideal Solution

My ideal solution would be to have Ephemeris (or some supporting service) connect to the reMarkable cloud (or in my case, rmfakecloud) like the tablet does, and sync back only the PDF content, leaving metadata and annotations intact. Unfortunately, I have not found a tool that would present a tablet-like file structure to interact with in this way.

My Current Solution : Syncthing

I'm using remarkable_syncthing to sync only the PDF changes to and from the tablet directly.

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.

Cons:

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

For me, the pros outweighed the cons. 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.

The end-result is a near-ideal solution for me, but I recognize that not everyone will be able or willing to pull it off. I will keep an eye out for better solutions to this problem. If you have any ideas for improvement, feel free to open a GitHub issue!

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