Everything you marked, quoted in your vault.
Your marks come across as text, not as a picture of a page. Each passage you highlighted, underlined or circled becomes a quote, the sentence around it included, filed under the heading of the section it sits in, with a link back to the page. Pen, highlighter and the Paper Pro's shader all count the same.
Where do the words of a quote come from?
The letters come from the document's own text layer. Nothing is guessed from an image, so a quote cannot arrive with a word spelled wrong, and none of it depends on handwriting recognition. That has one useful consequence: this part works identically on a Mac, on Windows and on Linux, with nothing to install and nothing to configure.
The marks live in the note of the document they belong to, in the folder you mapped to your tag. There is no separate collection note gathering everything you ever highlighted.
Can I link to one quote from elsewhere in my vault?
Each entry ends with a block ID — Obsidian's anchor for one single block of text. That makes one passage embeddable on its own, anywhere else in your vault, without dragging the rest of the document along with it. The ids do not change between syncs, so an embed you wrote in March still resolves in November.
Do EPUB highlights work too?
Yes. A reMarkable cannot display an EPUB. It builds a PDF out of the book on the device and shows you that instead — and the plugin reads the very same PDF. So a book behaves like any other document here: a highlight becomes the quote it was, under the chapter it belongs to, named the way the book's own table of contents names it.
One thing to know before you start, and it is the device's doing rather than the plugin's. Change a book's typeface, its size or its margins, and the reMarkable lays the whole book out again. Measured on a real tablet: every mark survived that — and every mark stayed exactly where it was on the screen while the words slid out from under it. A highlight that had covered one sentence now covered a different one.
Nothing can put those back, because the tablet no longer knows what they used to cover. What the plugin can do is warn you: a book whose page count has moved since its notes were written is reported when the sync ends, and so is a note that comes back with fewer marks than it had. So settle the typeface before you start annotating.
What happens to the notes I write in the margin?
These are off until you switch them on, and that is deliberate: reading handwriting is work your machine does for every note, and it needs one of the local backends set up. Once they are on, what you wrote beside the text arrives with what you marked — printed under the section heading it sits in, or beside the sentence it points at, with a link to its page.
You can also look at the handwriting itself: the eye in the corner of an entry cuts the strip of page the note sits on out of the PDF the note already embeds. It is drawn when you press it and at no other time, and no image of it is ever written into your vault.
Where does it give you less?
- A scanned document without a text layer. There is nothing to read out of, so highlights arrive as the words the tablet itself recorded, and pen marks are not recognised as marks at all.
- A PDF you only wrote on, without marking anything. With margin notes off, it syncs as the page you drew and no text — because the digest is built from what you marked, not from what you wrote.
- Section headings are guessed when a document has no outline. They come from the document's own bookmarks where it has them, and from a look at font sizes where it does not — so a document without bookmarks can file a quote under the wrong heading.
- Marker colour is a Zotero colour, or none. A highlight arrives in the note in the colour you used, matched to Zotero's eight; a colour outside them reads as an ordinary highlight. Pen marks carry no colour of their own. The whole loop, from sending a paper out of Zotero to getting the marks back, is written up in Zotero and reMarkable.
This part is in the plugin itself.
Highlights, underlines, pen marks, EPUB chapters and block IDs cost nothing and need no add-on. Pro is for syncing straight from the tablet and for cloud transcription — €24 once, if you ever want it.
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.