The other day I was playing and I decided to test out the SVG versus PNG question on my reMarkable again just to discover that they had changed their system and my old post Which Version of the reMarkable’s Templates Are Emailed Out? was no longer accurate. As such I wanted to share the new updated results with you!

Experiment

As before I started by creating three custom templates:

1. One with just the PNG image and not the associated SVG image
2. One with just the SVG image and not the associated PNG image
3. And one with both the SVG and PNG set but to drastically different looking images

I then uploaded all three to my reMarkable and used each one on a separate notebook page. Here I was able to see what image type was displayed before going on to export the page, via emailing it, three separate times so I could compare the results of all three of the offered file types: PDF, PNG, and SVG. This was the longest part of the experiment as I had to wait to see if I would receive each email and whether I'd need to resend one or more of them.

Previous Results

The last time I ran this experiment, in the summer of 2022 while running version 2.12.3.606 of the software, I noticed that in most cases (excluding exporting as a PDF) the PNG version of the template was sent out rather than the SVG file and when the PNG wasn't available it just didn't show the image. This supported my prior realization that it made no major different creating custom templates with just the PNG image uploaded.

Current Results

When I redid this experiment; however, I noticed drastically different results... thus leading me to share this post with you. This time around the SVG file was used in all cases unless it couldn't be found. When it wasn't found it switches to using the PNG version, in all cases, without a blank file showing like before.

While writing this I was curious what would happen if neither the PNG or SVG files were available so I connected to my reMarkable via SSH, removed all of those custom files while also leaving the JSON file untouched (so the templates still show up), and manually restarted my device. When I reopened the notebook I saw those pages, as expected, were now blank but I also saw that the thumbnails, shown when looking at all the pages at once, displayed the old image. That said, if I drew on the page or switched to another template the thumbnail was updated and, if still set to one of my custom ones, now blank.

And with that I hope this post helped you out. Feel free to share in the comments if you know something that can expand on this as I’d love to have your comment help other readers too. Also share if you have a question and I'll see if I can answer it.

I hope you’re having a great day.

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