Everything the plugin does and does not do, in the words people ask it in. If your question is not here, write to support@hochbichler.com.
Answers describe Tagged Sync 1.11.0 · November 2026
Yes — reMarkable and Obsidian work together through this plugin. You tag a notebook, a PDF or a single page on your tablet, map that tag to a folder in your vault, and the document arrives as a Markdown note: the pages as you drew them, embedded, with a searchable transcript or a digest of what you marked below them.
It reads your tablet and never writes to it. The plugin is free; a paid add-on covers a few extras.
Tag it. On the tablet you put a tag — “sync”, or whatever you like — on a notebook, a PDF, a page or a whole folder. In Obsidian you map that tag to a vault folder once, then run Sync now.
You need Obsidian 1.13.4 or later on desktop, and a reMarkable account with cloud sync on — or the direct connection to your tablet, which needs no account. Only a mapped tag is fetched; everything else on the device is left alone.
Only what you tag. A notebook, a single page or a PDF with a mapped tag syncs; anything untagged is never fetched. Tagging a folder passes the tag to everything inside it, including folders nested below — which is convenient and can be a lot at once, so look at how much sits under a folder before you tag it.
An unmapped tag is not lost, it is simply not selected. You can change or remove a mapping at any time.
It can, but it is off until you turn it on. Under Automatic sync you can start a sync when Obsidian launches, and add an interval while it stays open. A manual sync pushes the next automatic one back rather than running twice for nothing.
Yes. A synced page arrives with the page render from your tablet and a text transcript below it, so you can search and link your notes in Obsidian. On macOS this works with no setup at all.
On Windows and Linux you point the plugin at a local server you run — Ollama or LM Studio — so the text is made on your own machine either way. Transcription is free: no account, no API key. Like any handwriting recognition it misreads sometimes, so check anything that matters against the page.
Yes, on a Mac, since 1.9.0. Click into the page in the note, or open the PDF in Preview, press Cmd+F, and the word you wrote is highlighted on the page; Spotlight finds the PDF. The text layer is free: on a Mac, every PDF of a handwritten notebook or page the plugin writes carries your transcript as invisible, searchable text, whichever backend read it.
On Windows and Linux the PDF has no text layer yet; the transcript under the note is still searchable. Apple Vision finds where each word sits and the words come from your transcript, so the PDF and the note say the same thing; a word Vision cannot place is left out of the layer and stays in the transcript. There is nothing to switch on: notes synced before 1.9.0 get the layer on the first sync after the update. Obsidian’s own search pane does not look inside PDFs — it finds the transcript. Spotlight lists both, the note and its PDF: the note opens in Obsidian with the transcript, the PDF opens in Preview with the word highlighted.
Good enough to search and link your notes, not good enough to trust blindly. It depends on your handwriting and on which backend you use: Apple Vision reads cursive well but returns flat text, with no headings or lists; a local model keeps that structure and reads more accurately.
They fail differently, too. Vision’s mistakes usually look broken on the page, while a model writes its mistakes as fluent, plausible text — which is harder to spot. Check anything that matters against the handwriting, which the note embeds right above the transcript.
Yes, and that is the default. Three backends read your handwriting locally, with no account and no API key: Apple Vision on macOS 13 or later, which needs no setup; any local AI server you run yourself, such as Ollama or LM Studio, which works on every platform; and an optional managed local model that the plugin downloads for you, where your machine qualifies.
Each page is written to your system temp directory as a temporary image while it is read, and deleted straight after.
Yes. You name the model yourself on every backend except Apple Vision — the field starts empty and the plugin suggests nothing, because a model id baked into a plugin goes stale the day its provider retires it. A local server you run takes any vision model you have loaded.
Cloud services — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter — are part of the paid add-on and run on your own API key; they are off unless you turn them on.
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, for most notes. I measured seven cloud models on 264 handwritten pages, and it was the cheapest, the fastest, and the best or close to the best on tablet ink, scanned paper and phone photos alike. If you copy published text by hand, set Claude Haiku 5.5 instead.
Gemini declines to transcribe text it recognises as published, such as a poem or a book passage; since 1.8.5 the sync tells you which pages it declined. Gemini 4 Argon makes half the errors on scanned paper, at eight times the price. The model is the one you type into the Model field, for example gemini-3.1-flash-lite.
A few cents a month. With Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite or Claude Haiku 5.5 a page costs about 0.05 cents as billed, so 250 pages a month come to 12 or 13 cents. The provider charges your own API key directly, on top of the one-time €24 for Pro, which the cloud backends are part of.
The list price per token is a poor guide: a model that reasons before it answers is billed for that reasoning as well, and some of the cheapest-looking models end up costing as much per page as Haiku. Transcribing on your own machine costs nothing.
Yes — either all of them or just one. Re-transcribe all synced notes fetches every notebook again; Re-transcribe this note re-reads only the note you have open, so repairing one bad transcript no longer costs a whole-vault run. Both rewrite the transcript and the embedded PDF — on a Mac its text layer follows the new text — and leave anything you wrote yourself untouched.
This is also how you fill in a transcript that never arrived — a note synced before a backend was set up keeps its render and no text, and nothing refills it on its own.
Yes. Syncing, marked-up PDFs and typed documents work the same on Windows, Linux and macOS, because none of them go through transcription — the words come from the file itself. Handwriting is where the platforms differ. On macOS it is transcribed out of the box.
On Windows and Linux you point the plugin at a local AI server you run yourself, such as Ollama or LM Studio; until you do, notebooks still sync with the full handwriting render and no transcript. The managed local model the plugin can download for you has stricter requirements:
| Sync | Transcription | Managed local model | |
|---|---|---|---|
| macOS (Apple silicon) | Yes | Built in, no setup | Yes, 8 GB or more |
| macOS (Intel) | Yes | Built in, no setup | No |
| Windows on Arm | Yes | A server you run | Yes, 16 GB or more |
| Windows on Intel or AMD | Yes | A server you run | No |
| Linux | Yes | A server you run | No |
reMarkable 1, reMarkable 2, Paper Pro and Paper Pure. The Paper Pro’s larger canvas, its colour palette and its shader highlighter are all handled. The Type Folio works too: typed text is taken from the file exactly as you typed it. So do EPUB books and articles sent over with the “Read on reMarkable” extension.
The Paper Pro Move is not tested — I do not own one, so I will not claim it works.
No. The sync runs on the desktop app only — Windows, macOS or Linux, Obsidian 1.13.4 or later. What it writes, though, is ordinary Markdown with a PDF beside it, so the notes it has already made are readable on your phone like any other note in your vault. You just cannot start a sync there.
Mostly. The plugin is Apache-2.0 and the source is on GitHub — you can read it, build it and fork it. One folder is different: pro/, which holds the paid features, is public source under the PolyForm Strict licence, which permits personal and hobby use but not commercial use.
Using those features at work is what the paid licence grants. Everything else, including all transcription and the whole sync, is Apache-2.0.
Yes, with Pro: the plugin reads your tablet directly over a USB cable or over your Wi-Fi. No reMarkable account, no server, no internet. On reMarkable 1 and 2 there is nothing to switch on.
On Paper Pro and Paper Pure, SSH needs Developer Mode — switching it on erases the tablet (your notes come back from the cloud), and the tablet shows a warning screen at every start from then on. That is reMarkable’s rule, not this plugin’s. Read this before you buy Pro for it.
No. Any reMarkable account with cloud sync switched on is enough, and Connect changes nothing about how this plugin reads your notes. If you sync straight from the tablet instead, you need no reMarkable account at all.
Not with the default settings. Rendering and transcription run on your own computer, and the three local backends send nothing anywhere.
Six things do use the network, and each is named: transcription through a cloud service, which is part of the paid add-on, uses your own API key and sends the page image to that provider — you choose it, and it is off unless you turn it on; the licence check contacts polar.sh at most once every 7 days, carrying your key and nothing about your notes, and never for anyone who has not bought or started a trial; starting the trial sends taggedsync.com a 12-character hash of this vault’s Obsidian id, once, when you press the button, and nothing else; the optional local model is downloaded once, if you opt in; Add the render to Zotero — Pro, off until you switch it on — uploads the PDF as it looks on your tablet, ink and all, into your own Zotero Storage at zotero.org; and Push highlights to Readwise — Pro, off until you switch it on and add your own token — sends text only into your own Readwise library: the sentences you marked and the transcribed text of your margin notes and added pages, never the handwriting.
There is no telemetry of any kind.
Yes, if you sync straight from the tablet and transcribe locally. That combination needs no internet at all: the plugin talks to your reMarkable over USB or your own Wi-Fi, and the transcript is made on your machine.
Two things want a connection, and neither for long. Starting the free trial needs one, once, for the click that issues it. The licence check is forgiving — the last valid answer carries for 30 days, after which settings says so and Pro keeps working. Silence never locks the plugin.
Your notes stay, and the direct connection to your tablet keeps working. It has happened before — a format change in April 2026 broke every tool in this space — because that cloud interface is not documented or promised by reMarkable.
Everything already synced is plain Markdown and PDF in your vault; nothing is deleted, whatever happens on their side. Syncing straight from the tablet, part of Pro, does not go through that interface at all, so a change to their cloud cannot stop it. For the cloud route, what I can promise is effort, not a date.
Yes. A marked-up PDF arrives with a digest in place of a transcript: every passage you highlighted, underlined or circled, quoted with the sentence around it and filed under the section it came from, each with a link back to its page. The pen counts as much as the highlighter, the Paper Pro’s shader included.
The words come from the PDF’s own text, not from a picture of it, so no marked word can come out misspelled and this works the same on every platform. Each quote gets a block ID, so you can embed a single passage anywhere.
Yes, once you switch them on under Settings → Your notes on PDFs, called Handwritten notes before 1.10.0. They are off by default, because transcribing them is work your machine does per note and it needs a transcription backend. Each note is printed where you wrote it — under the section heading it sits in, or beside the sentence it points at — with a link to its page.
The same switch covers a page you added to the PDF on the tablet: what you wrote or typed on it arrives with what you marked.
You can also press the eye in the corner of an entry to see the strip of page it was written on. That image is drawn on demand and never written into your vault.
Yes. A reMarkable has no EPUB reader — it converts the book to a PDF on the tablet and shows you that — and the plugin reads the same PDF. So a highlight in a book arrives as the quote it is, under the chapter it sits in, named the way the book’s own table of contents names it.
Because the tablet laid the book out again. Changing a book’s font, its size or its margins makes the reMarkable rebuild the PDF it shows you. Measured on a real tablet: every mark survived that, and each kept its exact position while the text moved out from under it — so a highlight that covered one sentence now covers a different one.
The plugin mirrors what the device holds, so it cannot put them back. What it does is tell you: a book whose page count has changed is reported after the sync. Settle the font before you start annotating.
It is taken from the file exactly as you typed it and never transcribed, so no typed word can come out misspelled. Where it lands depends on the backend: Apple Vision knows where each line sits, so your typed text stays in place among the handwriting around it; other backends add it at the end of its page.
A typed page that reads like a document — an article you sent over, prose you wrote — is treated like a PDF instead: what you mark on it arrives as a digest, and that needs no transcription at all. Only that page — the handwritten pages of the same notebook keep their transcript.
Since 1.10.0 this includes a page you added to a PDF and typed on: its typed lines sit among the handwriting in the order they appear on the page, and a page of typed text alone needs no transcription at all. The switch Your notes on PDFs covers both.
Yes, since 1.8.0. Send a PDF from your Zotero library to the tablet, mark it up, sync: the note knows which paper it is and links to the Zotero item and your web library. With Pro, what you marked lands in Zotero as native highlights, underlines and comments. Needs a zotero.org API key; the desktop app is optional.
A note already in your vault can be aimed at an item by hand, with the command Link to Zotero item…. Switch frontmatter properties on and it also carries zotero-key and, where the item has one, citekey — the names other Zotero tools in Obsidian already read.
Two commands in Obsidian. Send Zotero PDF to reMarkable… finds one paper by title, author or year. Send tagged Zotero papers to reMarkable sends every paper you tagged to-remarkable in Zotero, in one go. The PDF lands in a Zotero folder, untagged; you give it your sync tag on the tablet when you want it back. Nothing is written into Zotero.
No. Sync never writes to your tablet; that has not changed. Send puts a PDF on it only when you run one of those two commands, and only adds. It never changes, deletes, moves or renames anything, and no automatic sync ever sends.
No. The free half works with zotero.org and an API key. The desktop app (Zotero 10, local API on) is the Pro connection: the plugin then reads and writes on your machine, and your marks reach Zotero without a zotero.org round trip.
Each connection is its own switch under Settings → Zotero. Turn Use zotero.org off and nothing Zotero-related leaves this machine, whatever key is stored. With both on, the desktop app is asked first and zotero.org catches the papers it has no copy of.
With Pro, yes: highlights, underlines and margin notes as native annotations, in the colour you used; your edits in Zotero win. Without Pro they stay in the vault, and the note says so. Group libraries are Pro too, each switched on by name.
Since 1.10.0 a page you added to the PDF arrives as a note under the paper, and the PDF with your ink on it can follow as an attachment if you switch that on; the next three questions have the details.
With Pro, it becomes a note under the paper in Zotero, titled Added page after p. 12, with what you wrote and typed on it. Edit the note in Zotero and your version wins from then on; delete the page on the tablet and the note goes to Zotero’s trash. Your zotero.org key needs notes access for this.
Without notes access your highlights still arrive and the note’s Zotero line says what was left out. A page added to a paper in a group library you switched on goes into that group, where everyone in it can read it. In your vault the same page shows under Your page in the digest, once Your notes on PDFs is switched on.
Yes, with Pro, and only if you switch it on: Add the render to Zotero uploads the PDF as it looks on your tablet, ink and all and searchable, as a second attachment named Annotated PDF under the paper, and keeps it current on every sync. It is off by default, because it is the one Zotero setting that sends your handwriting off your machine.
It goes over zotero.org into your Zotero Storage and counts against your quota there; the desktop connection alone cannot carry it, and if your files sync over WebDAV, leave it off — the plugin cannot tell the two apart. Only a document tagged as a whole is uploaded, not a single tagged page, and only into your personal library, never a group. Your highlights stay where they were, as annotations on the original PDF.
Your action wins, and the plugin never trashes the render itself. Rename it and your name stays through every update. Annotate it in Zotero, or replace the file, and it is never replaced again. Move it to another paper, or to the trash, and it is left there and not recreated; the note’s Zotero line names the reason each time.
To start over after you trashed or moved it, delete the synced note in your vault: the next sync writes the note again and uploads a fresh render. One you annotated or replaced stays yours even then.
Yes. Write text to Zotero, under Settings → Zotero → Into Zotero, is on once a connection is set up; switch it off and nothing new is written — no annotations, no notes — while what is already in Zotero stays. Add the render to Zotero is a separate switch, off until you turn it on. Both are Pro.
Nothing the plugin wrote is deleted by switching off. To remove it, filter your library by the tag tagged-sync in Zotero — everything the plugin created carries it — select what the filter shows and move it to the trash. Turning Use zotero.org off stops every call to zotero.org, whatever key is stored.
The colour you used, matched to one of Zotero’s own eight by hue rather than by the nearest value — so a pastel green stays green instead of turning grey. How many you have to work with is the device’s doing: a reMarkable 2 records three, a Paper Pro six with its highlighter.
The digest in your vault names those same colours, so one mark reads the same in both places. Recolouring in Zotero afterwards is safe — from then on your version of that colour wins.
It needs one of two routes: the reMarkable cloud, or a paired tablet with Send over SSH switched on, which is part of Pro. There is no third way onto the device, and no scheduled sync ever sends — only the two Send commands do, with your finger on them.
The direct route has one visible cost. A file arriving restarts the tablet’s reading app, because that is the only way it notices one: whatever you had open closes, and the home screen is back about six seconds later.
The sync finishes anyway. Your vault is written first, so a Zotero problem costs the Zotero half of one note and nothing more. That note’s top line names what went wrong: nothing answered, the key has no write access, a rate limit was hit, the item has been deleted.
The next sync tries again, and nothing needs cleaning up first: write-back only adds, refreshes and trashes, and each of those is safe to repeat. Whatever already arrived is not written a second time.
In four places. It wants Zotero 10, because the desktop connection speaks an API only that version has. Only PDF attachments travel, so an EPUB item stays where it is. The render needs Zotero Storage: a library whose files sync over WebDAV cannot receive it, so leave Add the render to Zotero off there. And an item holding two PDFs waits for the command that asks which.
Erasing a highlight on the tablet moves it to Zotero’s trash at the next sync — unless you had edited that annotation in Zotero, in which case your version stays.
Yes, with Pro, since 1.11.0. Tagged Sync pushes the highlights and margin notes of your reMarkable PDFs and EPUBs into your Readwise library, one way, on every sync: one entry per document, each highlight the sentence you marked with your words in bold, its page number and a link back to that page in Obsidian, from your phone too. They come up in your Daily Review.
You need a Readwise plan with API access, Full or Highlights, and your own access token, which stays in Obsidian’s keychain on each computer. Margin notes need Your notes on PDFs switched on, which is off by default. The first sync after switching on reads every note once more, so margin notes and added pages go to your transcription backend again: slower on a local model, billed again on a cloud one. Only text is sent, never your handwriting or a page image, and handwritten notebook pages are not pushed. Erase a mark on the tablet and it goes from Readwise too; a book you delete in Readwise stays deleted. This doesn’t put Reader articles on your tablet.
It is a Markdown note with the rendered pages embedded at the top. Below them, a handwritten notebook gets the highlights you made on the tablet, then a transcript split by page, so a long notebook stays navigable — each page heading links into that page of the render.
A marked-up PDF or EPUB gets a digest of your marks instead; a notebook with a page of typed prose in it gets both — the digest above, the transcript of the pages you wrote by hand below. If transcription is off or finds nothing, the note is still written with the render; that is never lost. On a Mac, the embedded pages also carry the transcript as invisible text, so searching the PDF finds the word on the page. There is no frontmatter unless you ask for it.
No. A synced note belongs to the plugin and every sync rewrites it — but if you have edited one, the plugin notices, refuses to touch it, and tells you how many notes it skipped. That note stops updating until you undo your change.
Every synced note says all this at the top, in a collapsed callout. Keep your own writing in a note of your own and link to the synced one.
Remove the tag on the tablet, or the mapping in settings, and it stops being updated. The note itself is never deleted — it stays exactly where it is, with everything already in it.
A note you have moved somewhere else in your vault also stays where you put it and is updated there; only changing the tag’s folder in settings moves notes, and then only the ones still in the old folder.
No. Routing is by tag: one reMarkable tag goes to one vault folder, and everything with that tag lands there, whatever folder it sits in on the device. Tagging a folder on the tablet passes its tag to everything inside, but the shape of that folder is not rebuilt in your vault.
If you want the device’s folder in your notes, the Pro frontmatter properties carry it as remarkable-folder, which you can group or filter by.
With Pro, yes. Switch on Frontmatter properties and every synced note carries the document’s tags as Obsidian properties, namespaced under remarkable/, along with when it was last changed on the device, its device folder, its type and whether it is pinned.
Every synced note then answers FROM #remarkable in Dataview, and Obsidian’s own Bases can query the same fields. Frontmatter you wrote yourself is preserved exactly; switching the setting off removes only what the plugin added.
The plugin is free, and the whole sync is: tagging, the embedded render, PDF digests, typed text and local handwriting transcription cost nothing and need no account with me. Pro is an optional add-on for €24 once — no subscription, no renewal, and every later Pro feature is included.
It has a 14-day trial that needs no key and no email, and starts with one click in settings while you are online.
Six things:
€24 once, for one person on up to 50 devices, at home and at work.
No. The sync runs one way only, reMarkable to Obsidian, and nothing is ever written back to your tablet — not a note, not a tag, not a deletion. Through the cloud, the plugin’s access is read-only. If you use the direct connection, it reads over SSH and writes exactly one thing, during pairing: a public key for your vault.
It also offers to switch on Wi-Fi access, and only if you say yes.
Since 1.8.0 there is one exception you run yourself: Send puts a Zotero PDF on the tablet, and only adds. See Zotero.
It does not sync back to your tablet (Send adds a Zotero PDF when you ask; nothing else goes up), and it does not pull from Google Drive or Dropbox — your notes come from the reMarkable cloud or from the tablet itself. It does not extract tasks or build an index across documents.
A scanned PDF that is only a picture gives much less: highlights arrive as the words your tablet recorded, and pen marks are not recognised at all. Tables come out as plain lines. A page you scrolled far past the screen arrives as a complete image, but only its top three screen-heights are transcribed.
They solve the same problem differently, and the honest comparison is on its own page. What is particular here: you choose what syncs by tagging it, transcription runs on your own machine at no cost, and Pro can skip the reMarkable cloud altogether. Tagged Sync is an unofficial, community-built plugin and is not affiliated with reMarkable AS.
Open the plugin settings and press Copy diagnostics — it collects your plugin and Obsidian versions, your platform, the backend you selected and the last error, and puts them on your clipboard. Nothing is sent anywhere by pressing it. Then open an issue on GitHub and paste it in. I read every issue. If your report contains anything private, email it instead.
The plugin is free in the Obsidian community store, and Pro has a 14-day trial that needs no key and no email. If you would rather read on: what Pro adds, or how this differs from a cloud service.
Desktop only — Obsidian for Mac, Windows or Linux. Doesn't open? See it on obsidian.md, or in Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → search Tagged Sync.