Eink tablets and PP

I’ve just bought a Boox eink tablet. New devices released today. Running Android 11. These look fabulous devices. But wondering if anyone has tried paperpile on an eink tablet? Devs, I assume you haven’t optimised it for eink devices?

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Welcome to our forum! You are correct - our viewer has not yet been optimized for e-ink devices or advanced stylus features, but the matter is on our radar as it has been brought up by other users here on the forum and via other channels as well. Adding your feedback to the topic on our tracker.

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I use the paperpile android client on an onyx boox Note Air (as well as on a samsung tablet).

It works “ok”. For some applications it is necessary to tweak how things are rendered. I turned off “whiten apps background”, and did something with “disable enhance font color”.

The paperpile android app is a bit buggy on both samsung and on the e-ink, it crashes frequently when switching to/from the app, and annotations disappear sometimes. It is no worse on the e-ink than on the samsung.

The e-ink device is good for reading, and only that. Switching pages is quite slow, so web surfing is frustrating. In my case (reading scientific papers), going to the end of a paper to check a reference and then come back is annoying. But I like that it is easy to read outdoors, even when wearing sunglasses, and the screen is big enough to show math subscripts without extensive scrolling/zoom.

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I also just bought a Boox Note Air 2 and have been using Paperpile on it…it works okay, however I don’t end up using the app much so far - Instead I sync the Paperpile Google drive folder to the device and mark up PDFs in the built in Neoreader as it’s much faster and more responsive. Third party apps are rather slow for inking especially as there’s some sort of input cache that quickly fills up from what I’ve read, meaning the data gets sent to the app in short bursts rather than in real time.

However, it saves the files right back to Google Drive, so my Paperpile files stay 100% up to date - this works well for me.

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Hey @NicFern , how did you set up automatic two-way Google Drive sync? I’d love to get something similar on my Onyx Boox Note 2 Air

Hi @kimberly_wilber - I use an app called DriveSync on the Note Air 2 - the free version can sync one folder as I remember. You can also pay a one time fee to get rid of the ads and set up additional folders but it works well enough for what I need.

It’s not quite automatic since it syncs on a schedule so if I need to use it the annotated version on another device straight away I just go to the app and synch it manually.

Initially I think I created a folder to store the library in on the boox and then told drivesysnc where I wanted the folder to go. You can then just open up files from that folder in Neoreader.

If it’s any use, I included some details in my review of the device here: https://www.nicolafern.com/blog/2022/01/26/onyx-boox-note-air-2/

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Hello @NicFern

Could you explain your sync workflow in more detail? For example, why is DriveSync necessary given that the google Drive app also syncs? What is being sync’d?

I have a Note Air 1 (and another android tablet) and would like a solution to be able to read and annotate paperpile .pdfs without using the buggy paperpile android app. I have installed the Drive app
and tried opening the paperpile folder in the Drive app, and then opening a .pdf with Xodo (an android .pdf viewer/editor), but could not get reliable results, and in fact it was quite confusing.

( If i recall, Xodo froze sometimes, or the Gdrive sync took a very long time, or it never seemed to sync at all in one case, and also annotations showed up as comments in the side bar which was not useful)

@NicFern I now understand your workflow and am trying it out.

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