reMarkable Round-Trip

Somewhere on your reMarkable is the best idea you had this month.

You can even picture it: the line through the paragraph that had to go, the circle around the one phrase worth keeping, the objection scrawled in the margin that would never have occurred to you at a keyboard. Paper does that. It slows the text down until you can hear yourself think.

Then you are back at your desk, and your vault has never heard of any of it. The tablet remembers everything and tells your vault nothing — a beautiful drawer that locks from the inside. So you prop the tablet next to the screen and retype your own thinking. Or you promise yourself you will, later, and a month of reading quietly evaporates.

This plugin is the way back. Send a note to your reMarkable, mark it up, run one command. Your note returns with your marks worked into it: the sentence you struck out is struck out, the phrase you circled is bold, the margin bar became a quote, the highlight kept its colour. And next Tuesday, when you search your vault for that idea, it is there — in the sentence it was about, with your objection sitting underneath.

Markdown you can search, link and edit. Not a photo of a page.

Early days. Fresh in the community plugin directory and under active development. It is used daily on a real device, and rough edges get fixed fast — please report what you hit.

Start here

1. Install. Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for reMarkable Round-Trip — or use this direct link — install and enable.

2. Pair. Get a one-time code at my.remarkable.com/device/browser/connect, then open Settings → reMarkable Round-Trip, enter it and select Pair. Self-hosting rmfakecloud instead? Toggle Self-hosted endpoint and give your base URL.

3. Send a note. Right-click any note → Send to reMarkable. Read it, mark it up, then run Import annotations from reMarkable from the command palette.

That is the whole loop. Everything below is detail for when you want it.

Sending notes

• Command palette: Send current note to reMarkable.
• Right-click a note or folder: Send to reMarkable — a folder sends everything inside it, with progress and per-file errors.
• Right-click a multi-selection: several notes and folders at once; duplicates are filtered out.
• Watch folder (optional, off by default): notes dropped into a folder you choose are sent automatically, after a short quiet period. Unchanged notes are skipped.

What happens to your note on the way:

• Wikilinks become readable text, ![[embeds]] are resolved inline, callouts become titled quotes, comments are dropped, and frontmatter is left out — or rendered as a small title block, if you prefer.
• It is typeset as a PDF on the reMarkable page grid, with font size, line spacing and margins you control. Reading rather than annotating? Switch to EPUB: it reflows, the device picks the type size, your headings become a table of contents, and non-Latin scripts survive intact.
• Your vault folders are recreated on the device under a base folder you choose. Re-sending replaces the previous copy; the old one goes to the device trash.
• Each note gets a stable remarkable-id in its frontmatter. That id — not the file path — is how a document finds its note again, so you can move and rename freely.

Getting your thinking back

Run Import annotations from reMarkable. The plugin finds the documents you have touched since last time and writes what it read into your vault.

What you get is an annotated copy of your note: your own text, unchanged, with the marks worked in where you drew them. Bold, italics, headings, links and lists all survive, because the copy starts from your note rather than being rebuilt from the page.

It lands in a companion note (Your note — annotations.md) so your source note stays untouched; a setting puts it inside the source note instead. Either way the plugin only ever replaces its own marked block, so anything you write around it survives a re-import.

Which marks are understood

No OCR and no model. The plugin typeset the page itself, so it knows where every word sits and can tell from the shape and position of a stroke what it did and which words it points at.

Worth knowing:

• A strike-through may be several strokes. Go back over it as often as you like; passes over the same words count as one mark.
• Through or under decides the meaning. Ink crossing the letters is a strike-through, ink below them an underline. Right on the baseline, strike-through wins.
• Two marks side by side on one line stay two marks.
• A margin bar must sit outside the text column, and be straight — a stroke with a corner in it is read as a remark.
• Highlight colours come back as the colours you used, straight from the device rather than mapped to a palette.
• A page you insert on the tablet keeps its place — it comes back whole, after the text it follows, and the pages after it still line up.

Changing what a mark means

The shapes are fixed — they are what a pen can draw. What they mean is your own convention. Under Settings → What a pen mark becomes, each of the three inline marks can be set to strikethrough, bold, italic, underline, highlight, or left alone. Circle the things you want highlighted? Set Loop around words to Highlight.

Margin bars always quote the lines they ran alongside, and handwriting always comes back as an image; those are not styling choices.

When placement is not possible

Placing marks needs the note to still match what was sent.

• Edited the note since? The annotations still come back, as a summary rather than a copy, with a warning saying they describe the earlier version. Send the note again to annotate the current one.
• Sent it as EPUB? EPUB reflows on the device, so there is no fixed page to anchor to; annotations come back at page level.
• Moved or renamed the note? No problem — it is found again by its remarkable-id, and the companion note moves along with it.

Every run writes a report to reMarkable Round-Trip log.md and copies it to your clipboard: what was read, what ended up in your vault, and which words each mark landed on.

Privacy and permissions

Your notes go directly from Obsidian to the endpoint you configure — the official reMarkable cloud or your own rmfakecloud server. No other services, no telemetry, no analytics.

Obsidian's plugin scan flags three capabilities. Here is what each is for:

• Reads and writes vault files. It reads the note you send and writes the annotations back. Nothing else is touched: generated blocks live between markers, so your own text around them survives a re-import.
• Lists all files in the vault. Only to find a note again by its remarkable-id when its path no longer matches — that is what lets you move or rename an annotated note without losing the link. Paths are read, contents are not.
• Writes to the clipboard. The import report is copied there so you can paste it into a bug report. The same report always goes to a note in your vault as well, so nothing depends on the clipboard. It is never read.

Your reMarkable pairing is a device token, obtained once from a code you enter yourself. It is stored in the plugin's own settings, and it is the only credential the plugin holds.

Known limitations

• Images render as placeholders in the PDF.
• Standard PDF fonts (full Latin-1 coverage; other scripts get ASCII fallbacks).
• Handwriting comes back as an image, not as text — reading handwriting is a different problem, and guessing at it would be worse than showing you what you wrote.
• The stroke reader is written against an undocumented format: unusual pens or a future firmware may not render. The import report says so when a page could not be read.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — Copyright (C) 2026 Max Kloosterman.

Versions up to and including 0.26.2 were released under MIT and remain so; from 0.27.0 the plugin is GPL, so that derivatives — in particular of the .rm stroke reader, which did not exist in JavaScript before — stay open.