From a stock Boox
to searching your own handwriting.

Check your computer can carry it

With a Boox tablet, the models are optional. Your handwriting is read on the tablet, by a stroke recogniser that sees the order and timing of every pen mark — 87.5% of words exactly right. The computer receives text that has already been read.

• Any machine that runs the app. macOS, Windows or Linux, awake and on the same wifi as the tablet when you sync. Search, commitments, deadlines, review, related pages, diagrams and export need no model at all.
• No models to download, and no minimum RAM. The app used to run a 6 GB model on your machine for two optional jobs. It read 64% of words — we measured it — and it ruled out every laptop that couldn't host it. It is gone.
• Two optional jobs now run on a reading server you name yourself, and the field is empty by default. They are: reading ink that never passed through a Boox (a reMarkable import, an annotated PDF), and answering a question you circled on paper. Leave the field blank and nothing about your notes leaves this machine; fill it in and the picture of that one region is sent to the address you chose.

Recognition runs where the pen is. That is why the tablet stays useful on its own, and why a modest laptop is enough to hold the archive.

Install the desktop app

This is the part that holds your archive, indexes it for search and serves MCP. It creates one folder and one index file:

~/gemnotes/notebooks/*.ink   ← your strokes. The source of truth.
~/gemnotes/index.db          ← derived. Delete it and it rebuilds.

Nothing else on your machine is touched, and nothing is written outside that folder.

Get the app →

Let it fetch its models, once

First launch downloads the vision model that reads handwriting. It's the slow step; on a normal connection expect to leave it alone for a while.

You do not install a runtime yourself and you do not pull models from a command line. Making that your homework was a decision we reversed on purpose, it quietly selected for people who could have built this themselves.

Install gemnotes on the Boox

Sideload the app, open it once, and grant it the pen. It appears in your app list like any other app and changes nothing about your device.

It can optionally take over as the launcher, so opening the tablet lands on a page, but that is off by default, is a single toggle inside the app, and can be undone three independent ways including one from your computer. The stock Boox launcher is never removed or disabled.

Pair over your own wifi

With both on the same network, the tablet finds the computer and sends strokes to it. Nothing routes through the internet, there is no relay server, because there is no server.

The first time a device sends, your computer asks you to approve it by name and shows a 4-digit code that must match the one on the device. Only then does it get a key, and every later request has to carry it. Honest limits: until you approve the first device the address filter is all there is, and the traffic is plain HTTP inside your own network. Both are on the security page.

Write a page, then find it

Write something on the tablet. Send it. On the computer, open the notebook, hit read this page, then type a few words from it into the search box.

Accents are stripped in the index, so typing without diacritics still finds the page, which matters, because handwriting recognition gets accents wrong far more often than it gets letters wrong.

That's the whole loop. Everything else on this site is built on top of it.