To conclude our a series of of articles about learning We will talk about managing study materials using free software. This is a very important topic because it is useless to have a study schedule and a good technique if we cannot find what we have to study.
In the old days, books were the primary study tool, and all that was needed was to place them in the appropriate section of the library and maintain a proper card system. As time went on, photocopies of chapters and parts of chapters appeared. Later, to manage the confusion, digital formats were added to support text, audio, images, and video. Luckily, there are apps that help us bring order to this chaos.
Managing study materials using free software
Management of study materials in physical format
tellico
tellico es a very useful application for managing and organizing different types of physical collections. For this purpose, it has pre-designed templates for videos, books, bibliographic references, coins, music, video games, wines, stamps, trading cards, and comics, among other things.
It has a structured database that allows storing all relevant information including title, author, genre, date and other data useful for retrieval.
Among its main features are:
- Predefined collection templates.
- Creating custom collection files.
- Support for an unlimited number of user-defined fields.
- Available field types: Short text, paragraph, list, checkbox, number, URL, date, image.
- Multiple search by authors, genres, and keywords.
- Automatic formatting of titles and names.
- Search
Organization and search
Managing entries with multiple authors, genres, or keywords.
Automatic formatting of titles and names.
Advanced search within collections.
Dynamic view filtering. - Different criteria for organizing information
- Import from MODS, BibTeX, RIS, CSV formats, PDF document metadata.
- Export to BibTeX, ONIX, CSV and HTML formats. Download information from Amazon, IMDb, Z39.50 Servers, PubMed, SRU Servers, CrossRef.
- Integration with external scripts to increase functionality.
- Importing CDDB data to be able to catalog audio CDs.
- Scanning and importing collections of audio files in various formats.
We can find this program in the repositories of most Linux distributions.
eBook Management
Caliber
There are open-source programs that are so good they've become a benchmark in their sector. This is the case with... Caliber. Calibre is a complete suite for working with digital books that includes:
- A book collection manager
- An editor of books in Epub format.
- An e-book reader.
Collection Manager
The collection manager allows us to add books from a storage medium or an e-reader device.For each book entered, you can manually enter the title, author, collection, identifier, and keywords for classification (if it isn't automatically populated). You can also download the cover from various websites.
It also features a powerful conversion tool that allows:
- Change font types, styles, and page sizes.
- Replace text automatically.
- Set the parameters for conversion to EPUB format.
- Converts to EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, DOCX, FB2, HTMLZ, KEPUB, LIT, LRF, PDB, PDF, PMLZ, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ, and ZIP formats.
It is also possible to delete books by:
- Format.
- Qualification.
- Main
- Device
It is possible to create book collections (libraries) and move books between them. It is also possible to create a server so that book collections can be accessed from other devices or to connect to book servers on other devices.
The book publisher
The book publisher It works with the EPUB format.
EPUB (short for Electronic Publications) is an open, standard file format designed for reading on electronic devices. Its main features include:
- Adaptable. The style can be adapted to the device and the reader's preferences.
- Based on the same technologies used by websites.
- Compatible with most devices
To use the EPUB book editor, you need a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, as it doesn't have a visual editor, although you can preview the results. When you open the book, you'll see the content in the left column, divided into:
- Pages.
- Styles.
- Typography
- Images.
- Additional content.
With the editor we can:
- Add, remove, or change the order of pages, style sheets, fonts, and images
- Modify pages and style sheets.
- Apply page templates.
- Fix code
- Find and replace content.
Book viewer
The book viewer allows both reading the text and listening to it using voices generated by artificial intelligence.In text reading mode, you can navigate the index, change background and text colors, highlight text, take notes, and access previously marked sections of text. In text-to-speech mode, you can select the playback speed.
Calibre can be installed from the repositories or manually with the command:
sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin
between formats
Digitization of texts
Scan to PDF
This program converts scanned images into searchable PDF documents. within the text. To make the generated files as lightweight as possible, the text is separated from the background and compressed separately. Finally, an invisible layer with optimal character recognition is added. It may be necessary to use an image processing program first for best results.
The program can be used both with the graphical interface and from the terminal.
The program is installed from the FlatHub store with the command:
flatpak install flathub com.github.unrud.djpdf
Scan Tailor
I mentioned above that the previous program might need pre-processing of The images. A good program for this is Scan Tailor, which allows us to perform tasks such as:
- Page division.
- Tilt correction.
- Add and remove borders.
- Export to PDF or DJVU
The program is in the repositories or can be installed from the Flathub store with:
flatpak install flathub org.scantailor.ScanTailor