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Comment by rolenthedeep | Hacker News Reader

How would one automate copying entries from Google calendar into a system like this? I'm fine with building a bespoke script on my remarkable tablet to pull from Google calendar, but I have no idea how you'd put that data into a pdf.

Are there any decent Linux CLI tools to edit pdfs this way?

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That would be pretty amazing, especially given most eInk devices don't have any calendar syncing to speak of.

I've used pdfcpu for some CLI pdf processing before and it's been great. Looks like it does have at least some basic functions for writing to pdf contents: https://pdfcpu.io/generate/create

Would love to hear if you get something like this working!

I'll give this a try, thanks!

This seems like the biggest limitation of a PDF approach. I’d want bidirectional sync to the calendar I can view across the rest of my devices.

Ditto with other types of notes.

Extracting data from the pdf might be more complex, as (at least in my use case) user originated data may be handwritten text or graphical drawings.

I'm sure there's clever things you can do, like a little NN to extract text and identify graphics, but image processing isn't something I know how to do or have the time to learn :(

At least the pdf itself is very portable. Simply keeping the document synced between machines is probably good enough. It's easy to navigate and you can manually extract pages or sections if you need to.

If pdftk can't do it, then inkscape scripts probably can.

Inkscape is an interesting possibility, I didn't realize they had scripting like that. Thanks!

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