reMarkable Round-Trip

You review documents on your reMarkable because it's more comfortable and intuitive than a screen. It simply feels more natural to physically strike out a sentence, circle a phrase or mark a paragraph with a line in the margin.

While reading, thoughts take shape — that's when I would add a remark or keyword as a hint for later edits. I wanted the best of both worlds. Writing and editing in Markdown with a keyboard or using dictation. Then switch to my reMarkable to slow down, review and think.

That is why I built reMarkable Round-Trip. Send your notes to your reMarkable with a simple command, review them and import your remarks back into the note they came from. The sentence you struck out is struck out. The phrase you circled is bold. The objection you scrawled sits under the paragraph it belongs to.

I hope you'll enjoy using it. If you know what it should do next — do let me know.

Where it stands. In the community plugin directory since the end of July 2026, and used daily on a real device. The loop is complete: send, review with the pen, import; write with the keyboard on the device and get that text back too. Development continues in the open — what gets reported gets fixed, and what gets asked for shapes what comes next. See CONTRIBUTING.md for reporting a bug, suggesting something, or sending a patch.

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, and keeps its own subfolder structure on the device even when folder mirroring is off.
• Right-click a multi-selection: several notes and folders at once; duplicates are filtered out.
• Choose a layout for one send: every send entry has a …(choose layout…) twin that opens a small dialog — preset, sliders, page breaks, prefilled from your settings — applied to that send only. Your saved settings stay as they are.
• 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.
• An embed pointing at part of a note — ![[Note#Section]], a nested #Heading#Subheading path, or ![[Note#^block-id]] — brings that part only, as Obsidian shows it. Handy for reviewing one chapter of a long note: put the single embed in a small note of its own and send that. What comes back is a summary of your marks rather than an annotated copy, because the note you sent holds the link, not the text.
• Task checkboxes (- [ ]) become real drawn squares you can tick with the pen, and a table row that is empty — or holds only a label in its first column — becomes a fill-in row with room to write: a note with log tables turns into a form you complete on the device.
• A \pagebreak line (Pandoc's convention) forces a new page — or let the plugin decide: the default Smart setting measures each #/## section and turns the page only when it would otherwise be split, so a day-per-heading log gets a page per day while a compact card stays on one. Prefer a fixed rule? A new page before # (or # and ##) headings is still there. Tables that fit on a page stay whole instead of snapping in two, and a heading never dangles at the bottom without its text.
• A paragraph that is entirely bold or italic — **Goal** as a label line — keeps its emphasis on the page.
• It is typeset as a PDF on your reMarkable's own page grid — pick your model under Settings → Page layout (reMarkable 1/2/Paper Pure or Paper Pro) — with a layout preset for what the page is for: easy reading, fill-in form, compact, or custom font size, line spacing and margins. 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.

Write on it, too

Reviewing with the pen is one half of the tablet; writing without distraction is the other. Send a note as editable text — right-click → Send to reMarkable as editable text, or run the command — and it arrives as a typed-text notebook you edit with the keyboard, not as a fixed page you annotate.

• ## headings, bold label lines, bullets (nested one level deep) and task checkboxes arrive as real device paragraph styles. Everything else — links, tables, code, single-# headings, inline styling — travels along as literal text, byte for byte, so nothing of your markdown is ever lost or renamed.
• Frontmatter stays home: properties are vault metadata, not text to edit. The note on the device is exactly the note body.
• Re-sending replaces the previous copy (the old one goes to the device trash), and the annotation import knows to leave these documents alone.

And the text comes back. Run Get edited text back from reMarkable (or right-click the note) and the edited text lands in the note itself, frontmatter untouched. With guard rails, because this is the one place the plugin replaces your own text:

• It only ever runs when you ask, per note.
• Before the note is touched, the previous version is saved to a previous folder — the message tells you where.
• If the note changed in your vault and on the device, nothing is merged silently: a dialog lets you pick which version the note keeps, and the other one is saved either way.
• If only your note changed, or nothing changed, the note is left alone and the message says so.

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. Just reviewed one note? Right-click it → Import annotations from reMarkable (or use the current-note command) to check only that one. Re-import annotations from reMarkable reads that one document again even when nothing changed on the device — handy after changing a mark-style setting.

Deleted a document on the reMarkable? The next import notices, stops checking it, and says so in the report. The note in your vault is untouched and keeps its id — send it again and it is re-linked seamlessly.

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.

The companion note always links back to the note it annotates. Want the other direction too? Turn on Link the source note to its annotations and each import keeps an annotations property in your note pointing at the companion — the two are one click apart, both ways.

Which marks are understood

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 — read locally, from stroke geometry alone.

Draw this on the tablet	Recognised as	Default result in your vault
A line through words	Strike-through	~~the struck words~~
A line under words, clear of the baseline	Underline	<u>the underlined words</u>
A loop around a word or phrase	Circle	**the circled phrase**
A vertical bar in the margin	Margin bar	The lines it ran alongside, as a > quote
The text highlighter	Highlight	<mark> in the colour you used
A tick or cross in a drawn checkbox	Task done	- [x] on that task line
A flat stripe through a drawn checkbox	Task cancelled	- [-] on that task line
A strike through a whole task line	Task cancelled	- [-] on that task line
Anything else — handwriting, arrows, scribbles	Remark	A cropped image in a callout, under the line it was written against
A page you added on the tablet to write on	Added page	The whole page as an image, placed after the text it follows

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.

Reporting something, or helping out

Bugs, questions and ideas all belong in the issues. For a bug, attach reMarkable Round-Trip log.md from your vault: the import writes it every run, and it answers most of what I would otherwise have to ask.

Patches are welcome too, with one thing worth knowing before you spend an evening on one: this repository is a mirror of a private development repository, so a pull request cannot be merged here — it is read and discussed here, and what is accepted travels onward with your commits and your name on them. CONTRIBUTING.md explains how that works, and where the product's boundaries lie.

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.