In a YouTube video the developer of My Deep Guide, which is a robust PDF organizer template for e-ink devices, talked about the issue of e-ink device lock-in. The issue is that when you use a brand of device, say Remarkable or Boox, there is not a way to move your data from one device brand to another. The only file formats common to all device types are PDF and ePub but that does not provide for extraction of the information within those file types.

The problem is not just with moving from one vendor to another, but affects searching for one’s writing, which requires some form of indexing of the handwritten data such that a search can be run. I touch on this issue in my recent post in which I describe using Google NotebookLM to search for what I write on my Viwoods AIPaper Mini tablet.

As I understand it, what one writes on the Viwoods tablet is translated to vector graphics data that is stored in a file on the device. Viwoods, like Boox, uses a “.note” extension for these file names and those files even sync to my Google Drive. The problem is, there is no application provided by Viwoods to read those files and thus provide a way to search within the files.

The problem here is very similar to about 40 years ago when word processors like Microsoft Word and WordPerfect were developed and used proprietary file formats. Back then the only way to view and thus search within your writing was to open the files in their original application, you couldn’t read Word files in WordPerfect or vice versa. Years later this issue became moot as application vendors reverse engineered the file formats so that files could be moved between word processor brands. Many people vow to avoid any possible word processor vendor lock in by only storing their writing in plain text that may use markdown for formatting.

I think the ideal for tablets would be a standard data file format for handwritten notes that either the tablet providers used natively or at the very least provided for exporting. PDF exports are the equivalent to printing a document and saving that hardcopy as an archive/backup, it provides a bare minimum but quickly becomes unwieldy as the number of documents and pages within them increase. We really need fully searchable formats to allow us to retrieve information from our writing.