reMarkable working practices

In its beta phase, I bought a reMarkable tablet, which claims to (and indeed does) "feel like paper"; it's basically a (fairly deliberately) functionally-limited E Ink tablet with a paper-like semi-haptic interface designed for note taking.

Physically, it is a lovely piece of kit: it's light, entirely monochrome (well, grayscale) in both the electronic and non-electronic parts, and well-constructed.

Its intended user seems to be one who loves the physicality of pen or pencil and paper, and for whatever reason wants the ability to store their creations electronically; it is not a massive stretch to imagine there might be many such users.

However, I've struggled with getting into a usage model that works for me: I have (well, had) three potential use cases:

• Day-to-day note taking at work.
• Reading and annotating graphically-complicated PDF documents from the PT Academy
• Reading ebooks: I was hoping that the bigger size, and bigger fonts, would make this easier than a Kindle, which is, to be fair, already pretty good at that.

Note-taking at work

However, the reMarkable doesn't really work for those: while it allows a local HTTP/USB connection for file transfer, that can be a little cumbersome, requiring a web browser for transfers; also, the file format is proprietary, which means that backup is all you've got once you've shifter your files around.

It is also possible to attach the device to reMarkable's own cloud service, with a dedicated app running on Mac and others, but the security of this cannot be guaranteed, and so it's not really suitable for work-related notes.

In their defence, reMarkable have used an open-source operations system as the base for the device, and also gone the extra mile by providing a root password in the device's Help About info. If you have a mind to, therefore, you could fairly easily knock up some scp-based synchronisation. That doesn't feel ideal, though - plenty of scope for things going wrong there.

Complex PDFs

It is definitely possible to get existing A4 PDFs onto the device, and scribbled annotations work well through the pen interface.

But to make the whole use case work, one really needs two things:

• Decent handwriting (and this, understandably, should probably be a given for users of the device) for the annotations themselves
• The ability to manipulate annotated PDFs off the device afterwards.

reMarkable can hardly be blamed for my handwriting skills, although from my recent experience at work, I'm better than most.

But it is disappointing that there is no real way to take annotated documents from the device, and then do something useful with them later. What would be nice, I guess, is the ability to extract the annotations as an image layer, or something similar?

General Reading

I read using an Amazon Kindle PaperWhite - the ability to increase font size has pretty much become a necessity over recent years for various reasons.

Most of the stuff I read is fiction, rather than technical, software-related text: I have tried that in the past, but the small page size doesn't lend itself well to technical discussions of software, which often require a physically wider page to accommodate long lines of oddly-punctuated text.

So I was very much hoping that I could just grab some ebooks, stick them on the tablet and read away with an even bigger font, but with an even bigger page to mitigate the reduced words-per-page metric.

The trouble here, though, is twofold: the transfer method is a little clunky, and it's really quite hard (and depending on your jurisdiction, possibly illegal) to bypass DRM protections to allow the reMarkable to read the books.

Again, it's hard to judge the makers for the encryption thing; but the file transfer and sync mechanisms would definitely benefit from some tidy-up work.

Do I Regret It?

It was a pricey bit of kit, and I can see its potential use cases, but it really doesn't work for me - it sort of does some things I like, but it doesn't quite make it. It has a lovely feel in its use, but I don't have any sense that it's making any of my jobs easier, or making me more productive.

With hindsight, I think I would - and in fact, I think I will - head off toward real pen-and-paper work, combined every now and then with a decent scanner. As an aside, there is plenty of work being done, and still to be done, around automatic detection of visual annotations on pen-and-paper documents, so more of that next time.