Oddbean new post about login | logout Markdown or AsciiDoc FTW! But yes, I save texts in those formats if I can, epub if I can't. PDF is blech, copying/extracting text mangles more than the formating...
I’ve been using Calibre to convert epubs and pdfs without images to .txt, and reading them in less. you can search for any string with / and in less, the v key opens $EDITOR, and you can add a —bkm to search for next time you’re reading, or add “margin notes” in [[ ]] brackets.
I have Calibre on my laptop. Less can do margin notes??? I should make more use of margin notes. How does it save them? I use Pandoc for a lot of conversions. And no matter what I use, converted PDFs still have glitches - dropped paragraph initial letters, random spaces, tables turned to mush...
I mean YOU add margin notes. You come up with your own system. For me, I’ll add a (1) in the text of a paragraph, then beneath the paragraph in double brackets I’ll write a note. And when it’s in .txt, all the Unix tools like awk, sed, cat, etc, work.
Fair enough! Yes I do that, but thought there might be something integrated and fancy!