Rocketbook QR Codes

I started using Rocketbook paper a few months ago as just generic notepaper. Most of the time I don’t scan, but it’s perfect when I do want a digital copy of whatever I scratched out. Part of that, I wanted to try and figure out the significance of the Rocketbook QR codes.

If you’re not familiar with Rocketbooks, they started out as a rewriteable notebook. Using their app you can snap a picture have have it sent to Evernote, Google Drive, email, or one of several other destinations. They also released free PDF templates and normal paper, and single use Rocketbooks are available as well.

A few days ago I started playing around with the idea of creating templates that I could use on top of the Rocketbook layout to make life a little easier. I was thinking a lesson plan template would be pretty cool.

But I needed to do a little decoding. On the bottom of each Rocketbook page is a QR code that tells the app it’s a Rocketbook page. There’s a black border around the content of the page. And there are 7 bubbles you can fill in to tell the Rocketbook app where to send your scan. Although, I’ve actually found it easier to not fill in the bubbles. Rocketbook will then prompt you for a destination and that seems easier than trying to remember what the horseshoe bubble means.

The first thing I tried was to scan a blank sheet of paper. The app didn’t read it. Then I tried a page with a thick black border. Still didn’t work. Then I tried a sheet with a black border and a QR code. Worked like a charm.

Rocketbook QR Codes

But now I wanted to figure out what the QR code meant, so I downloaded all of the sample PDFs they have and scanned the QR codes. The text is in the table below.

Physical Rocketbooks

The following codes were captured from images on Amazon from physical Rocketbooks.

More QR Codes?

The following codes showed up in the search referrers for this page. No clue what products they’re referring to, but I found it interesting that there are so many codes and wanted to include them here.

Thoughts

So, here are my assumptions about the Rocketbook QR codes.

P is the page number. I was looking at their PDFs, so they’d all be page 1. I did scan an image from Amazon and the page number was different. Although, this may not be quite that simple. A comment on this page back before I switched from WordPress to Jekyll mentioned that in his book the page numbers switched back and forth between P01 and P02 and were likely telling the Rocketbook app where to find the bubbles. That makes a lot of sense, and seems simpler overall.

Edit: Looking at the codes for the Panda Planner above, it does look like P01 and P02 are the page sides rather than page numbers. On the image on Amazon the right side page is P01 and the left side page is P02, and the rest of the code is the same. It might be an odd / even thing though since some of the codes are higher than 2.

V appears to a unique string for each layout. I assume this tells the app something, and is probably hard coded into the app. Maybe paper size. For all of the examples, I found it’s a V followed by a number followed by a letter, except for the Goal Agreement. It’s a V followed by 8. The letter graph paper is V, zero, oh.

No clue what the S followed by 7 zeroes is, but they were all the same except for the Goal Agreement. It had an S followed by 3 zeroes. But it also had a T followed by 2 zeroes and was the only one like that. Again, no clue what that means.

Also interesting that it’s always 16 characters. When a space gets added there’s one fewer character.

Paper Sizes

I did find out, several months after originally writing this post, that the code does have something to do with page size.

I tried printing some pages that were a third of a sheet, horizontally. So, 8.5 inches tall by 3.67 inches wide. Basically I was looking for a tall, narrow notepaper. Gave the page a wide black border and put the QR code from the downloadable letter sized PDF.

It didn’t work. The app wasn’t able to lock on the the page for a scan. But if I used the same QR code on a letter sized page or half sheet - 8.5 inch by 5.5 inch - it will lock on to the page and scan it. Not sure if there’s anything I can do to fix that unless there’s a QR code out there that is on a narrow enough page.

And I don’t think it’s specific to the page size. I think it’s the proportion. Scanning a half sheet of letter paper worked with the letter sized QR code. A commenter mentioned that the same QR code also works with large 24x36 inch paper which is about the same proportion.

What’s the point?

Really, probably isn’t a good one. Mostly curiosity. The QR code value doesn’t seem to affect the scans, at least not in any meaningful way that I can see. I played around and made a few different sheets that all had the same QR code and they worked fine.