Recently, I bought a reMarkable 2, a tablet-like device with an e-ink screen that allows me to replace real paper with digital note taking, while keeping the hand-written aspect of writing notes. The device also allows me to read and annotate PDFs in a comfortable way. Given that I use RMfuse to ‘mount’ the reMarkable cloud on my computer, I normally drag-n-drop the files I want to read in GNOME Files (formerly Nautilus, GNOME’s file manager) from their location on my computer to the mounted cloud.

This works really well so far. However, I also regularly receive files in the MS Office .docx format. Often I need to make substantial changes in these documents, which I do on my laptop or computer. But sometimes I only need to read them or only put my signature at the bottom. For these cases I would open the .docx file in LibreOffice, convert it to PDF and copy it to my reMarkable. In order to speed this up, I thought it would be nice to have some way where I right-click on a .docx file in GNOME Files/Nautilus and then convert it to PDF automatically, after which I can drag-n-drop the PDF file to the mounted reMarkable cloud.

So the question was: how can I add an item to the right-click menu of Nautilus, which runs a script when I click on it. After looking around on the internet, this turned out to be quite easy. It turns out that scripts placed in ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/ end up in the Nautilus right-click menu under the Scripts submenu.

To do the actual conversion to PDF, I created the following script: 

#!/bin/bash
# This script converts the selected file to PDF using LibreOffice
# For general instructions on how to use Nautilus scripts, see
# https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NautilusScriptsHowto
#
# Save this script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/ and make it
# executable.

IFS_BAK=$IFS
IFS="
"

for SelectedFile in ${NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS}; do
    soffice \
        --nodefault \
        --nolockcheck \
        --nologo \
        --norestore \
        --nofirststartwizard \
        --convert-to pdf "${SelectedFile}"
done

IFS=$IFS_BAK

Because I wanted to be able to select multiple files, some having spaces in their names, I had to make sure the space character wasn’t used to split the NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS variable. That is why I temporarily replace the IFS variable with a newline.

I have only tried this on .docx files so far, but I guess it would work on presentations and spreadsheets as well.

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