Ask HN: How do you organize your pdf library?

20 points·gbrindisi··7 comments

I have a directory full of papers, books and random documents and I am experiencing hard times in organizing them. Expecially now that the number of files is near huge it's really difficult to perform a succesfull and efficent search.

So do you have any suggestion to share? Tips, tricks, apps or whatever useful is welcome!

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I know that people who use MacOSX love with passion a software call "papers". Some people use mendely or zotero.

I am a Linux user and I use an opensource software called bibus. http://bibus-biblio.sourceforge.net/ It works crossplatform and it also serves as endnote alternative for citations, in case you need one. It does integrate with pubmed but not in the perfect way (somewhere in my todolist it says "fix bibus-pubmed interaction").

OS X user here... and its true. I used Papers extensively to manage academic papers.

http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/

For research papers, Mendeley is excellent - http://www.mendeley.com/

I use a similar broad topic based folder organization on both my dropbox ebook folder, and in my iBooks collections.

On Kindle it's just one big mess, but I don't have as many books in the Kindle yet (a dozen or so).

I use the same idea for Instapaper folders.

I load everything into Evernote. It scans your PDFs and makes the contents of them searchable, even images with the PDF will be searchable if they have text. Plus you can always open any PDF in Evernote with your viewer of choice.

You can add PDFs to iTunes. I add them in iTunes and hit Get Info and apply titles, authors, dates, tags, notes, etc. It's not perfect, but iTunes makes fairly decent PDF library thingy for me.

keep an eye on https://github.com/abhijith/cxr - a friend of mine is writing it to solve the same problem, but with a "search, don't sort" approach.

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