Hyperpaper Planner: fully interlinked dayplanner for e-ink tablets | Hacker News Reader

Hyperpaper Planner: fully interlinked dayplanner for e-ink tablets

hyperpaper.me

185 pointsnavanchauhan40 comments

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This is getting a lot of love. Scott Hanselman just posted a (nonspon) Tiktok about using it on his reMarkable.

https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman/video/7179775955521654058

It feels like something that's fairly easy to DIY, but they've priced it so it's not worth the time.

Wow, didn't expect to see this on HN! Creator here, happy to answer any questions :)

Does this work in Preview (on Mac) or Notability (on iOS)?

It'll work anywhere a pdf works! It's literally just a heavily customizable pdf file with lots of links to make navigation a breeze

If I wanted to change it, add something after I generate does it mean I have to pay another $20 or does it allow multiple generations after buying? I tried finding the answer in FAQ but couldn't.

BTW, the PDF do look sleek.

There's currently no way to edit your pdf after purchasing. However if you want any adjustments, just reply to the email with your planner attached, and I'm happy to make modifications and re-send. I've gotten a lot of great customer feedback and ideas this way!

This is great, it's a big PDF? How do all notes get stored (as annotations)? What does a file size look like when it's all filled up?

It's as big as you want it to be :) Some people build 1000+ page versions, which admittedly can push the filesize up a fair bit, but for the default config it weighs in under 3MB.

How the annotations are stored depends on the device you use. I just exported my 2022 planner in the reMarkable app with annotations (been using this file since May) and it's 32MB. So not exactly slim, but not massive either.

In my opinion this could turn in a top seller – and I wish you so – if only you could add the means to sync Hyperpaper Planner to other calendars, such as Apple's and Google's ones.

I would typically need to quickly import calendar files related to the various online events I have to take part. And the planner should account for the differences in time zones, so that I do not have to.

It’s a PDF, not a web app.

Not a big deal. You can edit a PDF programmatically, a la pdfcpu [0] or similar.

[0] https://pdfcpu.io/generate/create

PDF can embed scripts, but I haven't done this in a long time and I imagine that apps-in-PDF would expose wonky unmaintained code paths in a renderer.

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scrip...

Also search for "PDF JavaScript"...

Your point is? Various methods exist for running OCR on PDFs and then parsing the data and transforming it for structured input into other systems. Could be a periodic sync to the middleware; i.e. daily or at user's preference via emailing the doc.

Also a note for anyone ordering and not seeing their pdf arrive within ~20 minutes– looks like due to the surge in orders from HN some of the emails are being flagged as Spam, so please check your Spam folder!

I tested your demo PDF on my remarkable and I _love_ how you linked everything conveniently to make the whole thing easily browsable. I love it even more because a "link between pages" feature was exactly what I thought was missing to the remarkable to use it as a planner.

I thing I’m going to configure one and buy it.

Thank you!

Would love landscape versions.

Single Page App being one-upped by a Single PDF App! Wild idea here! It's so neat what we can do with a flexible medium.

> The planner is just a pdf file, so you load it onto your tablet like you would any other pdf or ebook file. The steps vary depending on the device you're using

A free alternative is here: https://recalendar.me/

It's open source as well (and I believe it predates Hyperpaper). Great place to start to see if this kind of organizing works for you.

I was curious about this, and my first commit was just 2 weeks before recalendar's! First hacky public "release" was in Nov 2021 :) https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/r5xj85/wo...

The hyperpaper/recalendar concepts are similar but the execution is quite different. You can try them both for free and see which one (if any) fits your brain best.

This is great; I had a thought that something similarly writable on tablets, but designed for tabletop RPGs would be great. The best of both worlds.

I use 5e Companion App on my phone, and find the interface is great. I have a Boox Note that I would love to have a way of tracking dynamic info (like spells) with the ability to write or erase overtop for things like notes, or maybe even HP...

I'm not exactly sure how it would work, but does anyone know if there is something like this out there? Some aspects could be handled through PDF links I suppose.

You might be interested in Ink and Switch's 'Inkbase' [1] concept. I'm not sure it's ready for Android tablets yet, but it seems to have a lot of potential for 'programmable' ink like you're describing.

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/

See also "My Daily Organizer" from My Deep Guide [0]

[0] https://www.mydeepguide.com/shop

This is not an attack on this app in particular; it looks very nice.

But every time another calendar/planner/to-do manager comes into the spotlight, I wonder about why people keep building these. Are the current leading apps not good? Is this just a very common "first app" kind of like how issue tracker/ticket systems seem to be reinvented endlessly? Or maybe the fundamental difficulty with managing calendars/tasks/to-dos is not the app, but the essential difficulty of the task?

This is coming from a person who doesn't have a complicated calendar, so the default app on my phone has always been more than adequate.

These are designed to be written on. Mainly, for e-ink tablet. It's not an app. It's just a PDF file with hyperlinked pages.

There are tons of them on the market especially with the rise in e-ink user (and it will probably accelerate even more with the release of Kindle Scribe)

I am one of those who is never been satisfied with my current calendar/todo/task/planner solution that's because we are productivity nerds. Every year or every few years you tend of optimize what you are doing as you get comfortable with your current solution because you want to add more to it as the number of things you want to track grows and expands.

Over the years my calendar has become something to remind & track my recurring tasks and events. I use a physical notebook as my planner(daily/weekly tasks) and note taking (almost like a bullet journal) but I also use Trello for project tasks and long term goal & its related tasks. I am not a fan of Notion but people love it so I have to use it when I need to collaborate with people.

And this is my current setup from past 18months, before that I relied heavily on my calendar for most tasks. But at some point it felt weird being stuck on the calendar and it ended up being a distraction as I was exposed to other things in my calendar most of the time. Your brain doesn't stop thinking about what you just read even if its not immediate.

The thing is, the more you dig deeper into optimizing this, the more holes you find in your system as everything at this point leads back to you(the user) actively needing to go to those systems yourselves.

Plus this product is for e-ink tablets, which is currently a niche product and as people switch to new products its easier to have a better optimized solution for it than going back to older solutions which requires weird ways to sync on the new device or something. I don't know how difficult working on other apps is on e-ink as I don't own one but generally moving away from heavy smartphone use over the years has taught me that these systems can work very differently on various platforms.

It will keep on coming because there are billions of people on planet earth and they have different way of viewing things.

> This is coming from a person who doesn't have a complicated calendar...

The more complex PIM software out there are not aimed at you, and it turns out those addressing more complex needs sometimes are hitting a market with higher margins. Business owners with complex, heavily-packed work and personal lives will pay a premium for a PIM software assistant that aligns with the way they think and go about their days.

With international travel and a busy life, I still lament the kind of integrations and features I tasted with the Apple Newton and Pimlico Software’s DateBk3 on PalmOS. I’ve yet to achieve that level of sophistication of seamlessly integrated data (Newton) or thoughtful attention to detail and densely-layered information presentation (DateBk3) again to this day. I am excited by the future possibilities AR, LLM ML, OCR, and voice recognition could bring to a re-envisioning of those platforms.

This is cool! I've made my own last year, but it took some time - I'd have probably paid $20 to skip the effort. Being personalized means I can have a few tasks show up every weekday which is handy.

How would one automate copying entries from Google calendar into a system like this? I'm fine with building a bespoke script on my remarkable tablet to pull from Google calendar, but I have no idea how you'd put that data into a pdf.

Are there any decent Linux CLI tools to edit pdfs this way?

That would be pretty amazing, especially given most eInk devices don't have any calendar syncing to speak of.

I've used pdfcpu for some CLI pdf processing before and it's been great. Looks like it does have at least some basic functions for writing to pdf contents: https://pdfcpu.io/generate/create

Would love to hear if you get something like this working!

I'll give this a try, thanks!

This seems like the biggest limitation of a PDF approach. I’d want bidirectional sync to the calendar I can view across the rest of my devices.

Ditto with other types of notes.

Extracting data from the pdf might be more complex, as (at least in my use case) user originated data may be handwritten text or graphical drawings.

I'm sure there's clever things you can do, like a little NN to extract text and identify graphics, but image processing isn't something I know how to do or have the time to learn :(

At least the pdf itself is very portable. Simply keeping the document synced between machines is probably good enough. It's easy to navigate and you can manually extract pages or sections if you need to.

If pdftk can't do it, then inkscape scripts probably can.

Inkscape is an interesting possibility, I didn't realize they had scripting like that. Thanks!

I don't understand the point of paper/PDF calendars in a world where we are able to synchronise calendar events across devices and receive timely notifications wherever we want them.

I guess some people just prefer carrying around a dedicated calendar and checking that manually for whatever reason?

I use it in meetings when it's not allowed to have m wifi activated devices. The remarkable two works without problems when you remove the wifi chip.

My use case is the remarkable tablet. It doesn't have fancy calendar apps, just a pdf editor.

Plus, having a dedicated thing for a particular task is useful for some people. It helps trick your brain into recognizing that it's time to do the task because you're looking at the thing dedicated to that task.

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