I’ve been trying to use org-drill regularly for the last few weeks. I don’t know how well it’s been going but I have been sticking to the routine religiously. I haven’t yet really tried out incremental reading, but in an attempt to make it as easy as possible, I wanted to have a pdf-reader integration, and some kind of integration with Kindle highlights. Browser integration is pretty straight-forward, thanks to some simple java-script.

I looked for a pdf-reader with some sort of plugin support, but I found nothing in Evince or Okular. I thought about pdfjs but it seemed slightly clunky to open pdfs in a browser, though I might shift to this if I don’t like what I finally ended up with. Good old xpdf seemed to be the only pdf reader that had some support for custom keybindings that allowed users to run external commands. With a little Python, I was able to setup a work-flow to capture snippets from xpdf, to add to org-drill. Custom key-bindings somehow don’t seem to work on xpdf bundled on Ubuntu. So, I ended up downloading and using the binary available on the xpdf site.

For Kindle highlights support, with minor updates to Thamer Mahmoud’s clip2org, I have a simple way of getting all the “new” clippings/highlights as org-drill headlines. I haven’t really started using this, and once I do, I may end-up automating even the merging of these items into the org-drill notes file. I’m looking forward to making better use of my Kindle, with this feature!

I don’t know if it would be useful to have more context information like section titles/chapter titles when capturing from html/pdf, but it seems like an interesting problem to try to solve.

Also, it might be easier(?) if I probably tried to have a DE level keybinding, and some code to get selection and file name of the currently active window/application.