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Distillate – Zotero papers → reMarkable highlights → Obsidian notes

Distillate – Zotero papers → reMarkable highlights → Obsidian notes

by rhl·Feb 17, 2026·4 points·4 comments
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AI Analysis

●●●BangerSolve My ProblemSlickNiche Gem

Bridges three tools academics already own, zero cloud lock-in, extracts highlights via wire protocol parsing.

Strengths
  • •Solves genuine workflow friction for a specific, non-trivial audience (researchers with these exact tools).
  • •Local-first architecture with rmscene parsing means no vendor lock-in or account overhead.
  • •Thoughtful feature set: scheduling, Zotero round-trip, Semantic Scholar metadata enrichment, email digests.
Weaknesses
  • •Narrow audience—only useful if you own reMarkable + Zotero + Obsidian; won't expand easily.
  • •v0.3.1 is early; watch for edge cases in PDF parsing and metadata handling.
Category
Productivity
Target Audience

Researchers, academics, and knowledge workers who use Zotero, reMarkable, and Obsidian.

Similar To

Zotero plugins (native PDF tools) · ReadWise (highlights-to-notes, but closed ecosystem)

Post Description

I read a lot of research papers for work. My workflow evolved around an ever-growing inbox of bookmarked papers from arXiv et al. Great for exploration, but hard to keep track of what I read.

Distillate bridges the tools I already use: Zotero (literature management), reMarkable (reader + highlighter), and Obsidian (notes). It automates the whole pipeline:

$ distillate

save to Zotero ──> auto-syncs to reMarkable

│

read & highlight on tablet just move to Read/ when done

│

V

auto-saves notes + highlights

It polls Zotero for new papers, uploads PDFs to the reMarkable via rmapi, then watches for papers you've finished reading in your Read folder. When it finds one, it:

- Parses .rm files using rmscene to extract highlighted text (GlyphRange items) - Searches for that text in the original PDF using PyMuPDF and adds highlight annotations - Enriches metadata from Semantic Scholar (publication date, venue, citations) - Creates a structured markdown note with metadata, highlights grouped by page, and the annotated PDF (I keep mine in an Obsidian vault)

The core workflow just needs Zotero and a reMarkable — no paid APIs, no cloud backend, your notes stay on your machine. Optional extras if you plug them in:

- AI summaries via Claude (one-liner + key learnings from your highlights) - Daily reading suggestions from your queue - Weekly email digest via Resend - Obsidian Bases database for tracking your reading

Stack: rmapi for reMarkable Cloud, rmscene for .rm parsing, PyMuPDF for PDF annotation. Python 3.10+, pip installable.

The trickiest part was highlight extraction: reMarkable stores highlighted text as GlyphRange items in a scene tree, and matching that text back to positions in the original PDF required fuzzy search with OCR cleanup, plus special merging logic for e.g. cross-page highlights. Happy to say it works well ~99% of the time now.

Install: pip install distillate && distillate --init

Code: https://github.com/rlacombe/distillate

Site: https://distillate.dev

I built this for myself but would love feedback, especially from other reMarkable + Zotero users. What's missing from your workflow? What else should I add?

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