handwritten text shows as empty outlines on remarkable

[Anonymous]

Thank you for a wonderful application. I am trying to migrate all the pdf’s I generated with my defunct Sony DPT tablet and I found that drawj2d + pdf2rmnotebook can (almost) do the job. After some tinkering (I had to flatten all the streams and layers), I get almost there, but not quite. The hand drawn text, which is basically a bunch a splines, appears as empty/transparent outlines. I took a screenshot of the remarkable desktop, I hope the attachment goes through so you can see the effect, together with the original pdf. Any ideas would be very welcome!

Thank you,
<adrian></adrian>

[A. Vontobel]

Unfortunately the "empty outlines" issue is not easy to solve.

Pdf files usually define shapes by their outlines and tell the viewer program the shape has to be filled. The rM file format however does not support "fills" (at least I am not aware of). Instead it uses strokes with an attribute for the line width. Unfortunately it is not straight forward to implement a reliable algorithm that fills a polygon using strokes, as we would do by hand. Thus drawj2d just draws the outlines.

As a work-around convert a page of hand written notes to a raster image (png). Keep the resolution low (e.g. 200 dpi). Then you may try
echo image page.png 200 | drawj2d -Trmn

While there won't be the issue of missing fills there are other limitations
- black and white only
- file size might get large
- memory demand can get too large for the rM device
-> device gets slow when the page is open (or cannot even open it).
It still might be worth a try.