Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

I'm really glad I bought my ReMarkable2 (and Marker "Plus"), as it suits my use case extremely well: replacing stacks of 8.5x11" graph notepads, while adding digitization / sync, undo/redo, select/cut/paste/resize/move, (modest) pan/zoom, etc. Battery life and form factor are great. The writing UX is really something: low-latency, ~perfect hand detection, and the "feel" of writing. Yeah, the software's mediocre, but it's gotten noticeably better since I bought it ~6mo ago. And it's still early days. The OSS community did wonders for the RM1, and I expect RM2 to follow suit. It's not a do-anything kind of device (I absolutely love my Kindle Oasis for reading) but for me it was easily worth the $.

View on HN

Same here. I had literally dozens of moleskines that I've been writing in for nearly 15 years. I'm a huge fan of paper, but was looking for a solution that allowed me to digitize my note-taking without giving up the ergonomics of paper.

As you point out, the "writing UX" was so astonishing, it was probably the quickest "adoption" of any major tech upgrade for me.

I wrote some notes on my experience and the transition from paper here: https://jessmart.in/articles/remarkable

I bought Remarkable 2 and returned it sadly. It does one thing very well which is writing. But not a great tool for reading PDFs. When I figured pinch to zoom was not possible that was it for me. It’s a really polished tool for wiring but they have a lot of room to improve for reading experience.

As others have said, pinch to zoom works now.

Although that only helps to zoom in to one spot, if I were to try using that to read a page where the font is too small, having to shift the page left and right while zoomed, it would be a nightmare to read a document.

My gripe is I cannot switch the device to show a PDF in landscape mode. Then at least pretty much all documents' fonts would be large enough, if I use the height of the device for the width of the PDF. Then I would only have to scroll down and only after reading half a page. That would work well, scrolling left-right-left-right-.... while zoomed in does not, unless the page has two columns of text so that I don't have to scroll right-left-....

I use my RM2 mostly as epub reader. For the price - I got the preorder discount - it was the same or even lower as other pure readers of a similar size.

The software does have some weaknesses, for example sometimes I have to edit the epubs and remove some CSS background color because it ends up black on dark gray (unreadable of course), or it has set defaults for font, line height and such settings and I cannot set new defaults so I end up setting those for each and every document I sync to it anew. Still, it's acceptable for me, it's just a few (now muscle memory) clicks. To sync I sometimes have to start the Windows app to which I added a document a second time before it uploads it to the cloud server. That too now is a muscle-memory action. I hope they fix it some day but it's not a deal breaker.

I did a bit of writing and that just works and feels very good too. Other than the base use cases the software is very barebone. As others have pointed out, that's a goal. The device does everything I expect from it, which is just some basic writing and the epub reading. I can send webpages to the device (while it's online) by clicking an extension icon in the browser, which I do for RoyalRoad chapters, for example. WebToEpub creates epub files for entire Webnovels, which have to be uploaded using the Windows app though.

For me main use case is reading research articles annotate on it and sync it with my desktop and share it with my colleagues. Ideally I wanted a bibliography library tool like mendeley or zotero and keep all my annotations and notes synced. But that is far from possible on any e-ink tablet so far I have tried.

You can get reasonably close. You can use the zutilo extension for zotero which offers you a "move to tablet" option where you just point it to directory. I point it to a fuse mount of the remarkable. When zutilo moves the pdf to the tablet it removes it from the bibliography (just the pdf) and adds a special tag. At a later point you can do a fetch from tablet and zotero pulls back the paper from the tablet directory and extracts the annotations. This is also the biggest issue, because it can't extract text from your handwriting.

I'd pay real money for something like LiquidText rethought for e-Ink.

That's interesting, because I read PDFs (and annotate) every single day. Pinch-to-zoom works great, and it's the best PDF reader I've experienced. Can't recommend highly enough.

Pinch zoom is available in PDFs now. I'm on 2.7, but I believe it was added in 2.6. It works really well. Of course it's far slower than on a normal tablet due to the e-ink screen, but it's definitely fine for me.

I think it's actually impressive speed-wise. Not a real tablet speed but in my case even large, graphics heavy documents work quite well.

I'm surprised they pulled this one off.

Absolutely. I just added the comment because I've had some friends who are unfamiliar with e-ink screens expecting tablet behavior.

I just refereed a research paper with complex (color!) graphics on the thing. It was an absolute breeze!

Yeah, I'm on some facebook reMarkable groups and it's stunning how many people bought it without watching a single video from manufacturer. They though browser, video, dropbox/google drive/others will be available, or that it will integrate with their decade worth of notes from various services...

Those tablet e-ink devices does some of that. reMarkable is just a notepad with very simple cloud sync to their cloud.

Ok I gave up too early then. Ah well I didn’t have patience.

That's disappointing to hear. I've been on the fence about way to pick one of these up but I had heard that the reading experience was sub par. I have yet to find an e-ink tablet that's attractive enough to spend money on.

I bought it as well and returned it. It is just too small for reading PDFs comfortably.

I'm using ReMarkable 2 as well and am happy with it, but if I would just wait for other devices to come up I'd consider boox nova or something like that for their completely different (and better) text convertion and so on.

But still - the device is quite awesome and I tough myself some drawing. Use it all the time to prototype diagrams and show architecture. Love it that I can draw some weird system connections on a diagram, copy and paste, and change some parts. Then I send a PDF and use it as a flip-book on zoom cals :)

Opensource tweaks are pretty good now. Some are actually obsolete as ReMarkable did nice improvements to zoom and document links. But most tweaks support RM2 already.

I have a remarkable 2 as well and It's a fantastic notetaker and pdf annotation device. One benefit I didn't think about beforehand but use somewhat frequently is signing documents while working from home. Just print to pdf, copy to remarkable, sign, email back to sender. Way easier than printing, signing, scanning, and then emailing back.

In those cases I usually take the PDF, open it with LibreOffice and paste over my signature, scanned once upon a time. Never got any complaints, but it could be easily discovered for sure.

This is my experience too. I used to keep a stack of notebooks around, and I never seemed to have the right one on hand. Now I just have to keep track of one notebook that will never run out of space. With the most recent updates the e-reading experience has also gotten much better.

At this point the only feature I'd say is lacking is some kind of e-book store integration. I'd like to be able to purchase books from mainstream publishers to read on the device (it's sad how few publishers distribute books in non-DRM, plain ePub files these days).

Me too!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com