Calibre for Writers, Digital Note Takers

[calibre-user]

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!

[msel]

Hello calibre-user,

when automatic adding books you can do auto-merge:

calibre Preferences > Adding books > Adding actions:

Auto-merge added books if they already exist: Overwrite existing duplicate formats.



calibre Preferences > Adding books > Automatic adding:

Check for duplicates when automatically adding files

If a file already exists in calibre and you create a new pdf output of the file in your automatic adding directory, then the file is overwritten.



Greetings, Maria

[kovidgoyal]

automatic adding is designed to delete the file it adds. All you need to do is in whatever build step you use to create your final file, add a step that makes a copy into the automatic adding folder.

Or if you want to be more sophisticated you can use the calibredb add command line tool to do your adding in a script.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by calibre-user

<snip>

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.

<snip>

If you are writing the documents on the same platform on which your calibre library resides, you could keep the writing tool files (e.g a .TYP file) in the library alongside the output file the writing tool creates (e.g a .PDF file).

Calibre will store non-ebook formats files in its book folders, like ebook formats, only one instance of each file type for a 'book'.

Providing the OS has .TYP files associated with Typst, calibre will invoke Typst when you View a .TYP file. You can then do the edits in Typst and save the .TYP and .PDF files from Typst to overwrite the existing files in the calibre library book folder.

I would create a new 'book' by creating a Empty book and then add a 'blank' .TYP and a 'blank" .PDF to that book.

I use MS OneNote .ONE files to keep checklists, reminders, notes etc for 'books'.

Probably not suitable if there are multiple people doing the editing.

BR

[Quoth]

I only proof via epub. PDFs are only for POD, they are horrid to proof & annotate.

I only import to Calibre for proof reading on a Kobo, but the Full Text search is good for a selection of ebooks.
I export annotations from Kobo via Calibre to KATE as plain text and have KATE session with multiple files for each project. Notepad++ is the windows equivalent.
I started with Wordstar, then clone, then my own editor, then Word 2002/XP and eventually Libre Office even before moving from Windows to Linux finally in Jan 2017.
I used to do fragments in plain text in Jota on Android, then switched to Nebo (Advanced Notebooks) on the Kobo Sage, though still Jota on the phone. Now I have Jota and Nebo on the TCL Nxtpaper11 tablet, and also Libre Office Writer to use only as a viewer. The tablet has a 256G SD Card so has every document going back to 1992 as copies of the laptop/workstation/server files. The Android Nebo is far superior to the cut down version on Kobo.
The multiple tabs/docs per project in Notepad++, then KATE on Linux is since about 2006. Also a spreadsheet to track status / revisions.
I would only use Calibre to convert to epub and manage epubs for reading on the Kobo Sage. About 700 bought ebooks since 2013 and 6000+ PD ebooks (collection started before Calibre existed). About 40 ebooks for proofing / revision and version/revision is in file name and title.