remarkable-simplenote

Simple tool for syncing a Simplenote account with a reMarkable cloud account.

There is no perfect mapping between reMarkable notebooks and Simplenote notes, so there's some built-in opinions about how the sync works.

Status

The "Basic" case below works; that is, pull from simplenote and sync to reMarkable. I'm going to start on some of the offline OCR workflows next, but at least now I get PDF versions of all my Simplenote notes on the reMarkable \o/

Key tools

• Simplenote API: the simplenote Python package
• reMarkable API: the rMapy Python package
• text/markdown to PDF: pandoc document converter
• PDF to text (OCR): Tesseract, a Google OCR engine

Sync model

Let's start with a few facts:

• Simplenote works in the "text domain". Simplenote items are ultimately just formatted, annotated text.
• reMarkable works in the "document domain". Most of the content on a reMarkable is unsearchable images of handwritten text and PDFs imported from elsewhere.

So to sync these means that we have to transform Simplenote text to files that can be rendered on the reMarkable, and do what we can to extract text from reMarkable notebooks to put them into Simplenote notes. Tracking changes on both ends will be tricky.

Out of scope

There are some sync pathways that are out of scope:

• Update reMarkable notebooks based on changes in Simplenote text. This would mean some crazy business like creating new notebook content with the typewritten text replacing the original handwritten text or something. Not going there.

• In fact, updating reMarkable notebooks in place at all. I don't want to take a chance of messing up notebook contents.

• Not totally off the table but very unlikely: Updating Simplenote text based on handwritten annotations on the PDF done on reMarkable.

Basic: Simplenote to reMarkable, one-way

Push all Simplenote notes, rendered into PDFs, into the right folder on reMarkable.

"The right folder" is complicated, given that there are no folders in SimpleNote. For my use case, it's important that my notes get put into the right folder but the rules are pretty complicated; I use a numeric filing system wherein the path can be inferred from the title of the note but it's not an exact match. For example, the title might be "101.12.02 Quarterly TPS Targets", which could go into the folder "101 Important project/12 Planning/02 Q4 2020/" as a file called "101.12.02 Quarterly TPS Targets.pdf".

I don't want to impose this on anybody else so I have some config to control this. Since the above is the only folder strategy I am using, I am only doing one other strategy, which is "all notes into the same folder". If anyone else ever uses this tool I am happy to discuss other folder strategies based on Simplenote tags or whatever.

The folder_strategy config var can either be "jd_title" for my special Johnny Decimal title strategy, or "bucket" for all notes in one bucket. If you choose "bucket", folder_bucket should contain the visible name of the reMarkable folder.

Improvement: reMarkable to Simplenote, one-way

Grab notebooks from a specified folder on the reMarkable. Run them through an OCR process to extract text from the handwritten notes. Push the OCRed text into notes on Simplenote with an appropriate tag.

Note that if we do both of these first 2 steps, we end up with a separate OCRed version of reMarkable notebook contents on the device in a separate PDF.

This still isn't really a sync, since (for example) new annotations on Simplenote notes done on the reMarkable, or changes to the OCR'ed text of notes in Simplenote that were originally from the reMarkable, will not be reflected back in their source documents. In fact such changes will be discarded on the next pull-push if the source doc ever changes.

Improvement: Support OCR corrections from Simplenote

If we hand-edit the notes synced from reMarkable to Simplenote, it may be possible to preserve those changes for the future. These are probably valuable changes to preserve since they are likely to be OCR fixes.

Any way around this assumes that changes to the reMarkable source notebook will end up being OCRed the same way under basic editing operations.

• When edits are made to the Simplenote note, record diff output between the original OCR text and the edited text. This can be done on the fly if we store a version history.

• If subsequent changes are made to the reMarkable source doc, apply the previous diff after doing OCR on the new version. Heuristic the crap out of it to try to DTRT on chunks that don't apply.

Improvement: Support handwritten edits to Simplenote notes

I don't know how overlays to PDF docs created in the reMarkable are represented. Almost definitely we couldn't support editing in the body of a PDF by like strikethroughs or other kinds of editing annotations. But we could possibly support append-only edits if the handwritten text can be OCRed separately from the PDF content.

Sync pathways

Simplenote --> reMarkable

This is the most straightforward path. The Simplenote API allows us to download the whole account's worth of data and keep it in sync with our local document store.

We can then render each note into a PDF file using pandoc and sync it up to the reMarkable cloud via the reMarkable API.

reMarkable --> Simplenote

The rmapy API allows us to download metadata and content of reMarkable notebooks (and PDFs and ePubs). Eventually we might be able to OCR this content and push to Simplenote notes, who knows!

Installation

From a the top level of the source tree,

pip install .

This will install needed Python dependencies, but you will also need to install a few non-Python tools for processing documents:

• pandoc (converting markdown to PDF)
• a PDF engine for pandoc, I use wkhtmltopdf
• exiftool, a file metadata reader/writer

You will need a local directory to store config and sync cache; it will be created automatically on first run, and defaults to ~/.remarkable_simplenote/. If you choose another local directory, pass --path=<dir> on the command line.

Configuration

Configuration is pulled from a Python "conffile" formatted file called config in the local cache directory, so by default ~/.remarkable_simplenote/config.

Here's mine:

[default]
simplenote_user= <username>
simplenote_pass= <password>
folder_strategy=jd_title
folder_match=start
folder_bucket=Notes
pdf_engine=wkhtmltopdf
pdf_engine_opts=-T 0mm -B 0mm -L 10mm -R 0mm --user-style-sheet /home/grib/.remarkable_simplenote/wkhtmltopdf.css

If using wkhtmltopdf as the PDF engine, you probably want to create a CSS file to style the notes more nicely. Here's the basic one that I use:

body,p,li {
  font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size: 16px;
}

Invocation

usage: remarkable_simplenote [-h] [--pull [{remarkable,simplenote} ...]]
                             [--push [{remarkable,simplenote} ...]]
                             [--path PATH] [--force-pull] [--force-sync]
                             [--force-push]

Sync reMarkable and Simplenote

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --pull [{remarkable,simplenote} ...]
                        Pull content from the specified source(s)
  --push [{remarkable,simplenote} ...]
                        Push content to the specified destination(s)
  --path PATH           Local config/cache folder
  --force-pull          Pull remote content even if unneeded
  --force-sync          Convert pull to push even if unneeded
  --force-push          Push data to remote even if unneeded

First data is pull-synced to the local store from the named remote sources ("pull"), then the pulled data is format-converted and processed into the push queue ("sync"), then the push queue is push-synced to the named sources ("push").

If the --force-THING option is not passed, we try to do the minimum amount of work possible by looking at object version numbers.

You can do this process either in a single pass, as in

remarkable_simplenote --pull simplenote --push remarkable

or in separate pull and push steps.

"sync" happens automatically after "pull", so it's not necessary to mention it on the command line unless you want to force it, such as if you need to change your wkhtmltopdf stylesheet and want to rebuild all the pdfs. In that case you can just run the sync by itself:

remarkable_simplenote --force-sync