Uploading PDF to a Remarkable 2 from the command line
Context
I recently bought a Remarkable 2 paper tablet, initially as a mean to replace my paper notebooks, to take notes, sketches etc.
I'll write a more complete article in the future (disclaimer: so far I like it!), but this article is about a different topic: uploading PDF to the Remarkable 2.
One of the use cases I wanted to dive into is: when I see an interesting article, I would like to read it later, but not on my phone nor on my laptop - reading it almost as paper would be awesome... so why not uploading a PDF version to the Remarkable, and read it before going to sleep?
RCU to the rescue!
Remarkable Connection Utility (aka RCU) is a very nice program developed by Davis Remmel, which works across platforms (i'm using it on FreeBSD and MacOS).
It comes with a GUI and plenty of features, but in today's article, I will focus
on its CLI capabilities:
of course, because I wanted to automate the PDF uploads to the Remarkable, I
didn't want to use RCU's GUI.
Looking at the RCU manual, indeed there's a section about using the CLI!
First, get the collection ID
rcu --autoconnect --cli --list-collections
g23f92s1-k781-h2n1-wsa2-49b2e49sa212 TO_READ 2751906132986
Write down the first entry (g23...)
Then upload the PDF
rcu --autoconnect --cli --upload-doc-to <PATH_TO_PDF.pdf> g23f92s1-k781-h2n1-wsa2-49b2e49sa212
Wrap Up
And voilà! The PDF has been uploaded to my Remarkable, I can now enjoy and read it later.
I will write a script to automate things a bit further: put PDF I want to read in a specific folder, and have a script regularly check this folder, and upload to the Remarkable if there are new entries.
Tags: Geek