Website to PDF to Remarkable 2 (Firefox)

This repository contains components and code pieces which allow you to send PDF version of the website you are currently viewing to your Remarkable.

It consists of the following components:

1. Python web service which generates PDF of a provided URL and places it in a specific directory.
2. Firefox extension which sends URL of the website you are currently viewing to Python web service
3. Script which adds / pulls that content to Remarkable

Right now there are multiple options for 3), depending on how comfortable you feel with using Remarkable cloud to push content to your device.

First approach uses a simple bash script which runs as a cron job and periodically checks directory where the PDFs are saved and uploads any new files to RM2 using Remarkable cloud.

Second one relies on uploading those PDFs to Nextcloud directory and nextcloud running a systemd timer which uses rclone to periodically pull down next files from Nextcloud (e.g. https://github.com/merqurio/remarkable-syncthing).

This approach supports moving files directly to a directory (when the service is co-located with Nextcloud) or uploading it using WebDAV protocol.

Nice thing about this "composable" approach is that you can add additional steps to the pipeline.

For example, bash script which I used to sync content to Nextcloud also runs imagemagick on the PDFs and darkness them to increase the contrast and make them easier to read.

Directory Layout

• python_app/ - Python flask service for converting website to PDF
• firefox_extension - Firefox extension.
• scripts/ - Scripts for moving / syncing files to Remarkable.

Usage

To run the service, you can use example docker-compose.yml file in the root directory - make sure you modify necessary environment variables.

Notes, Limitations

1. Firefox extension can't directly generate a PDF which means we need to have an intermediate service which takes care of generating the PDFs.

   Service will generate the PDF by visiting and rendering the website which means it will only work for public website and situations where no state (e.g. cookies or being logged in) is involved.

   Technically, pdfkit and wkhtmltopdf (https://wkhtmltopdf.org/) which is used underneath allows you to send custom cookies, etc. but sending custom cookies from Firefox to extension to the service would open a whole can of security related issues and it's not a good idea.

2. For any kind of serious deployment, you should deploy Python service behind TLS (that's easy to do with docker compose, example configuration is stored inside .examples/ directory).

Service supports simple "secret in query parameter" based authentication, but you are encouraged to add another layer of protection by putting Nginx basic auth in-front of it (that's again trivial to do with nginx proxy running inside Docker container).

Note on the generated PDF contrast

As mentioned above, the web app will generate a grayscale PDF. Depending on the original website font color, etc. the output PDF may have a low contrast which may be hard to read on Remarkable.

To work around that, this repo contains a script which utilizes imagemagick to darken the generated PDF and increase the contrast.

In fact, this script may also come handy in many other situations where you have a low contrast PDF which is not easy to read on Remarkable.

Before darken:

After darken:

Copyright, License, and Contributors Agreement

Copyright 2020 Tomaz Muraus

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this work except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License in the LICENSE file, or at:

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0