rmscene

Python library to read v6 files from reMarkable tables (software version 3).

In particular, this version introduces the ability to include text as well as drawn lines. Extracting this text is the original motivation to develop this library, but it also can read much of the other types of data in the reMarkable files.

To convert rm files to other formats, you can use rmc, which combines this library with code for converting lines to SVG, PDF, and simple Markdown.

Changelog

Unreleased

v0.5.0

Breaking changes:

• The start property of GlyphRange items is now optional (#15).
• The representation of formatted text spans has changed. Rather than using nested structures like BoldSpan and ItalicSpan, the CrdtStr objects now have optional text properties like font-weight and font-style. This simplifies the parsing code and the resulting data structure.

New features:

• Improved error recovery. An error during parsing, or an unknown block type, results in an UnreadableBlock containing the data that could not be read, so that parsing of other blocks can continue.
• Compatible with new reMarkable software version 3.6 format for highlighted text (#15).
• New methods read_bool_optional and similar of TaggedBlockReader which return a default value if no matching tagged value is present in the block.

Other changes and fixes:

• The value attribute of scene item blocks, which was not being used, has been removed.
• Check more carefully for sub-blocks (#17).
• Type hints fixed for expand_text_items.

v0.4.0

Breaking changes:

• Rename scene_items.TextFormat to ParagraphStyle to better describe its meaning, now that we have inline bold/italic text styles.
• Remove methods from scene_items.Text object; use text.TextDocument instead.
• Writer: experimental change to emulate different reMarkable software versions by passing {"version": "3.2.2"} options to write_blocks. This allows us to continue to test round-trip reading and writing of old test files as new data values are added. Replaces "line_version" option.

New features:

• Parse text formatting information (bold and italic) introduced in reMarkable software version 3.3.

Other changes:

• Allow empty text items and unknown text formats without throwing exceptions.
• When extra data is present in the file, log the unrecognised bytes at DEBUG logging level along with the call stack, to make it easier to figure out where the code needs to be modified to read new data.
• Parse new data values (with unknown meaning) in PageInfoBlock and MigrationInfoBlock.

v0.3.0

• Introduce CrdtSequence type to handle the different places that CRDT sequences are used, not just for text.
• Introduce scene_items module with data structures representing the data, independently from the Blocks used to serialize them to .rm files.
• Introduce a SceneTree structure which holds the SceneItems in groups/layers.
• Move Text data from RootTextBlock to scene_items.Text class, which includes methods for extracting lines of text and formatting.
• Text lines now include the trailing newline character.
• Read GlyphRange scene items, representing highlighted text in PDFs.

v0.2.0

• Try to be more robust to unexpected data introduced by newer reMarkable software versions.
• Only warn once if unknown data is present, rather than for every block.
• Small API change to return type of read_block and read_subblock methods.

v0.1.0

• Initial release

Acknowledgements

https://github.com/ddvk/reader helped a lot in figuring out the structure and meaning of the files.

Contributors:

• @Azeirah -- code and reporting issues
• @dotlambda -- packaging