Today, reMarkable has released version 3.7 of its firmware for the reMarkable 2.
Let’s take a look at what’s new…
Convert Selections of Handwriting to Text
It is now possible to convert snippets of handwriting to text using the selection tool. Previously, you could only convert a whole page of handwriting to text.
Using the lasso-selection tool, highlight some handwriting and tap the handwriting conversion button. Tapping elsewhere on the canvas and tapping the paste button will insert the converted text.
Highlight Text Handles
When you select text on your tablet, you now get draggable handles so that you can select exactly the snippet of text that you would like to manipulate (manipulation options are cut, copy, make bold or make italic).
Previously, you were restricted to either selecting a single word or the whole text.
New Navigational Keyboard Shortcuts
This will only concern users that use the reMarkable 2 with the keyboard folio.
You can now:
- Switch between menu sections with Tab key
- Show recent and favorite documents with the Alt+Tab keys
Verdict
The option to convert selections of handwriting to text is an interesting feature that I am sure will be invaluable to many users. For example, if I am working in a text document, I can quickly jot down some handwritten annotations and add them seamlessly to the existing text.
The addition of handles for selecting text seems to be marketed as a new feature but to my mind it is really just fixing a pre-existing feature – the handles should have been there from the beginning for the text selection tool to be truly useful. Although there are times where you want to cut/copy/bold/italic a single word or all of the text, I expect a more common requirement would be to select a sentence, paragraph or quote, which was not possible before this update.
And I’m sure the new navigational keyboard shortcuts will be useful to a subset of type-folio users.
Overall, it is a minor update that brings some slight improvements to the reMarkable 2 experience but nothing to get too excited about. It has become apparent that reMarkable seems to be releasing these small (and sometimes insignificant) updates on a monthly basis, perhaps so that they can use the number of new software releases in their marketing materials (as shown below):
About the author
Dan Dutton is passionate about E-ink writing tablets, which bring together the pleasure of writing on paper with the power of digital technology. When he bought his first tablet, he realised that there wasn't a lot of unbiased information available for people that were considering buying an E-ink tablet, and so he built eWritable.