Hi fellow Calibre users,
I've been using Calibre for about three to four years and have greatly enjoyed the user experience. Calibre is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best, software for managing and searching through (already published) books.
In addition to being an avid reader, I also take a fair bit of digital notes when studying (due to the advantages of digital notes, e.g., seamless portability vs. paper notes) , and have a feeling that Calibre could be beneficial to people like myself who have extensive digital notes. Having one's digital notes be indexed alongside other books like textbooks would allow searching through all of one's digital content, via Calibre.
While adding already published content to Calibre is straightforward, it isn't the case for material that is actively being edited with document editing workflows (like Latex and Typst) that separate the output (e.g., .pdf file) and the source (e.g. .tex, .typ file) – with every edit, a new output pdf file is created, and needs to be added to Calibre to overwrite its previous output file.
Calibre has a function to automatically add content to itself (add books > control the adding of books > automatic adding) that appears to almost address this challenge. I use the terms "appear" and "almost" here because I am not well-acquainted with this feature. I envision this feature could be used as follows:
1. Set up Calibre to automatically add pdf files that appear in the directories housing the new pdf files created by my document editing workflow.
2. However, Calibre (ver 7.3.0) always deletes files after they're added to Calibre, and does not provide an option to disable this. (!!!) It would be great if an option were offered to disable this so that the output file could be preserved.
There is a chance of circumventing Calibre's automatic book adding if Calibre is able to add and index content (e.g. pdf file) without needing the content to be physically moved into Calibre's directory. I don't know if Calibre supports something like this, and would be interested to hear back from people who have a clue.
I admit that this post could possibly be construed by some as stretching Calibre's use case/target audience, but what can I say, I feel that catering to writers and digital note takers, a group of people who likely do a whole lot of reading, could potentially be a great direction to explore.
Thanks for reading, and hope you have a good day!
