commit 8beb6f95f2d72a0a66caee2e276d197922d9c464
parent bed83fbc11c3323a3ffbaffcb5e668868bf24c23
Author: Paco Esteban <paco@e1e0.net>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2021 10:47:58 +0200
new article: document conversion for remarkable2
Diffstat:
2 files changed, 51 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/src/gophermap b/src/gophermap
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@ Sometimes I write things so I do not forget ...
o--o-- Random (usually tech) stuff
+0Semi automated document conversion for the Remarkable2 /semi-automated-document-conversion-for-the-remarkable2.md e1e0.net 70
0kubectl plugins /kubectl-plugins.md e1e0.net 70
0Aliases and helper functions for the shell /aliases-helper-functions-shell.md e1e0.net 70
0Easy DNS zone management across providers /easy-dns-zone-management-accross-providers.md e1e0.net 70
diff --git a/src/semi-automated-document-conversion-for-the-remarkable2.md b/src/semi-automated-document-conversion-for-the-remarkable2.md
@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+Title: Semi automated document conversion for the Remarkable2
+Author: paco
+Date: 2021-08-22
+Type: article
+
+My wife recently acquired a Remarkable2 for note taking and document reading
+while studying.
+
+The device itself is quite nice, it's like an e-book but bigger and you can
+take notes on it. The hand writing works really well, and the bigger screen
+makes reading PDF files a way better experience than on a Kindle for instance.
+It can also convert a handwritten document to text. They even [enable SSH
+access][1] to the device and provide the root password.
+
+If I had to put a "but" to it, it will be that the way of sharing documents or
+the OCR'd content of a handwritten document is quite limited. One can only
+send the document or the OCR'd text via email. Also, the only export format is
+PDF for the handwritten documents and drawings.
+
+This would probably cover 90% of the use case of most of their customers but
+this was not our case. Wife's uni works with the Microsoft 365 suite (yeah,
+that, I'm not going to start rambling here about this ...), so she uses it for
+all things uni related, even her own notes and study documents. This means
+that she would have to convert her notes to text on the device, send them via
+email, copy the output on her email client and paste it into the final MS Word
+document.
+
+I find all this process a little bit convoluted, so I started to think on
+making it a little bit easier.
+
+The email you get from Remarkable it's just an HTML email with the OCR'd
+content.
+
+I took a peek at `pandoc` and it seems that it can convert from `html` to
+`docx` with a simple command: `pandoc -f html -t docx -o $destfile $origfile`.
+
+Right, this is a first step on the right direction. One cannot avoid the steps
+of converting to text and send by email, but getting a MS Word document in your
+inbox and avoid the copy/paste dance.
+
+As I have my own email server, it's trivial to create a dedicated account for
+this task, and pass any email that comes from Remarkable to a custom script
+that does the conversion and then sends the newly generated MS Word document as
+an attachment to my wife's email account.
+
+And that's what I did. You can find my crappy script [here][2]. I'll probably
+modify it and improve it over time, but for now it works for our use.
+
+[1]: https://remarkablewiki.com/tech/ssh
+[2]: https://git.e1e0.net/remarkable2_utils/file/conversion-filter.pl.html
