This project automates the conversion of handwritten notes exported from Boox e-ink devices into structured Markdown summaries suitable for Obsidian. It uses GPT-4o for summarization and runs continuously in the background, monitoring a synced folder for new PDFs.

1. Boox Sync: Notes exported from your Boox device are saved to ~/Dropbox/BooxNotes/Raw/
2. Folder Watcher: A launchd-managed Python script (boox-watcher.py) detects new PDFs
3. Processing Pipeline:
   • Converts PDF pages to images (via poppler)
   • Sends images to OpenAI's GPT-4o API
   • Receives a structured Markdown summary
   • Outputs a Markdown file to ~/Dropbox/BooxNotes/Processed
   • Moves the original PDF to ~/Dropbox/BooxNotes/Archive
4. Persistent Logging and macOS notifications provide transparency

---
title: Systems
tags: [boox, notes]
---


Summary of my handwritten notes on complex systems theory...

(Structured output generated by GPT-4o)

Scripts/BooxNotes/
├── boox_parser.py          # PDF-to-summary processor
├── boox-watcher.py         # Folder watcher with notification/logging
├── .env                    # API key (excluded from Git)
├── processed.json          # Tracks processed PDFs (excluded from Git)
├── boox-watcher.log        # stdout log (excluded from Git)
├── boox-watcher-error.log  # stderr log (excluded from Git)

• Python 3.11+
• openai >= 1.0
• watchdog
• python-dotenv
• poppler (pdftoppm must be in PATH)

brew install poppler
pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a .env file in the same directory:

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A launchd job (via com.readist.booxwatcher.plist) ensures boox-watcher.py runs continuously, even after reboot.

cp com.readist.booxwatcher.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
launchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.readist.booxwatcher.plist

tail -f ~/Scripts/BooxNotes/boox-watcher.log

.env processed.json *.log

This script is currently running as a persistent background service. All new Boox-synced handwritten PDFs are automatically summarized and moved to your Obsidian-ready folder structure.

• YAML frontmatter enrichment (e.g., date, tags from note)
• Optional OCR fallback
• Multiple vault support