Why I Needed Chinese Font Support
The reMarkable 2 is an A4-ish-sized eInk tablet made by a Norwegian company, also called reMarkable. It’s designed for reading, writing, and thinking — without the usual notifications, distractions or temptations of a typical smartphone or tablet. I use mine to read and annotate longer documents like standards, regulations, essays, and articles. Over time, it’s become a quiet but essential part of how I do deep work. And the kind of work I do involves more than just English: documents and regulations are often written in or include Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters — especially in global firms or cross-border risk contexts. So getting proper font support isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s part of making the tools I rely on actually work in the world I’m working in.
But one of the strange things about the reMarkable tablet - given how polished it is in many ways - is that it doesn’t support Asian language fonts out of the box. When Chinese characters show up in a document, you’ll just see little squares. Sometimes it’s just one, sometimes three in a row where proper characters should be.
As I work with Chinese documents now and then, or even bilingual ones with English followed by Chinese in brackets (especially names or key terms), I wanted to fix this.
Trying to Solve It
I came across a helpful guide. But I hit a few snags, namely:
- Which specific font(s) should I install?
- Why was I getting an error when trying to install them?
I tried a few routes - command line, Cyberduck, FileZilla. Same problem. After a bit of back-and-forth with ChatGPT (and a bit of terminal log sleuthing), I suspected it might be a file permission issue. Turned out it was something else.
What Was Really Going Wrong
The root file system (/dev/root) was filling up when I tried to copy all seven font files. That was the blocker. While the tablet itself announces it has 6.52GB of storage, only a small fraction of this is devoted to the file system, and there’s only a sliver of unused space to work with. So instead of copying the whole set, I just selected one - the regular weight - and uploaded only that.
Then I updated the font cache and rebooted the device:
fc-cache -fv
reboot
After reboot, I opened up one of the documents that has Chinese characters.
得咗喇 !
One Final Gotcha
One thing to watch: software updates on the reMarkable often wipe these changes. I’ve had to go through this a few times now, which is why I’m writing this up for future me (and maybe for you too).
Step-by-Step Guide
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Download a font set. Using this helpful guide, I went with this one: NotoSerifHK-VariableFont_wght.ttf (about 16.8MB). If you also work with Japanese or Korean documents, similar steps apply — just swap in the right font file.
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Enable USB web interface mode on the reMarkable. On the tablet, go to: Menu → Settings → Storage. Toggle the “USB web interface” to On. This will give you an IP address for the device. Take a note of it—you’ll need it soon.
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Plug the tablet into your laptop. I use a MacBook, so the steps may vary slightly if you’re on Windows. I prefer iTerm over the default Terminal, and use FileZilla when I want a visual view of the file system.
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Get your SSH login credentials On the tablet, go to: Menu → Settings → Help → Copyrights and Licenses. Scroll down until you see a paragraph that mentions your SSH login. The username is root, and you’ll be given a password. Copy this somewhere secure.
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Connect to the device. You have a couple of options here. You can use the terminal and SSH in directly, or you can use a file transfer tool like Cyberduck or FileZilla.
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Copy the font to the right directory. Once you’ve logged in via SSH or connected using your file transfer tool, you’ll want to place the font file in the correct location.
/usr/share/fonts/
Create a new subdirectory inside /usr/share/fonts/ if it doesn’t already exist (e.g., /usr/share/fonts/chinese) and copy the .ttf file into it:
mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/chinese
cp NotoSerifHK-VariableFont_wght.ttf /usr/share/fonts/chinese/
If you encounter issues, you can use this command to check how much free space you have on /dev/root, in case that might be the issue:
df -h
- Update the font cache and reboot Back in the terminal run the following command to clear the font cache:
fc-cache -fv
reboot
After the reboot, Chinese characters in your PDF or ePub documents should now render correctly. Handwriting and system UI won’t be affected.
Disclaimer! this has worked for me, and I haven’t bricked my device - yet. But there’s always that risk. Back up anything important before you start, just in case. reMarkable still provides USB access and root password support, so my hope is that they’re intentionally leaving that door open for tinkerers.
Final Thought
For anyone working across geographies or with multilingual material, these little fixes help remove friction. They’re not just technical tweaks — they’re part of setting yourself up to read more, think better, and do good work. If that’s your kind of thing, the reMarkable is worth having in your workflow.
A quick word for anyone who’s asked me about my reMarkable tablet
I get asked now and then if the reMarkable is any good. My usual answer is something like: “It depends — but if you do a lot of reading, and you want somewhere quiet to think and write, it’s worth considering.” That still holds. It’s not for everyone. But if you do deep work — the kind where you’re reading long articles, reviewing documents, making margin notes, or sketching through a problem — it can absolutely earn its place in your tech arsenal.