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Comment by jobigoud | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, I just realized this week that there was an entire category of software dedicated to doing something I've been painstakingly doing manually for years, organizing your collection of papers.

They are called reference managers, and will extract the title/year/author/abstract so you can quickly glance at that obscure "iccp2012.pdf" you downloaded last month and know if it's relevant or not to your current task. Provide full text search on your entire collection, synchronization between home and work, etc.

Coming from an engineering background I had no idea these existed, but it sure will save me a lot of time and frustration.

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Those capabilities are remarkable. There is so much software on the internet now that you can perform a kind of magic trick:

1. Envision what you would like software to do to help you with some task.

2. Figure out what software like that would be called, and what search terms/search engine it would be found on.

3. Enter terms into correct search engine, find that the software exists, install it and start using it.

"In a recent xkcd's alt text, Randall Munroe suggested stacksort, a sort that searches StackOverflow for sorting functions and runs them until it returns the correct answer. So, I made it. If you like running arbitrary code in your browser, try it out."

https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/

That idea might approach something useful if it was combined with memory for how various algorithms have done and the ability to optimize over time by choosing better algorithms. It would be sort of like a meta-algorithm.

Zotero is the Open Source choice. The best feature is keeping a BibTeX file with all your bibliography updated.

Can you tell me how to do this? I used to use Mendeley before it was bought by Elsevier, and it had a useful function of exporting your entire library to a single BibTeX file automatically each time you added a new reference. I've not found a way of replicating this behaviour in Zotero (I can manually export to BibTeX, which is great, but I'm lazy and if the program can do it automatically, I'm all for it!).

See autozotbib zotero plugin. It may be close to what you are looking for.

https://www.zotero.org/support/plugins

It might be different in the browser, but in Zotero Standalone (which is what I use), right clicking the name of the collection in the left sidebar will give you an option to Export Collection. BibTeX will be one of the options. It works pretty well. I occasionally had issues with special characters and had to make changes every now and then for biblatex.

Papers is a cool product / company based in UK (London IIRC).

edit: http://www.papersapp.com/

The Netherlands, I think.

I agree, Papers is great. I have been using it since the earliest version, both on my Mac and on my iPad. Neither has ever given me trouble.

Not sure about that [0]. Can someone clarify?

0: http://www.papersapp.com/about/

Ah, they've moved since they started. Their new offices are indeed in London, though if you look at the copyright notice on the footer of that page you'll see it has a Netherlands address. Their careers page [1] does say their new offices are in London.

When they started, the two founders were both still mainly post-docs at the Netherlands Cancer Institute [2], and that's what I remembered, reinforced by the copyright notice I mentioned above.

[1] http://www.papersapp.com/careers/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070213053257/http://mekentosj....

I love Papers but they've been ridiculously slow with retina support; I wouldn't mention it, except it's the easy things that still haven't been done, such as coloured circles for tags, while more complicated things (many icons/artwork etc.) were done ages ago.

They released a major new version (Papers 3) just under a year ago. One of those 'fresh start' kinda releases; a re-think of what a reference app should be like, and substantially different from Papers 2. I still haven't upgraded because it doesn't do much more than Papers 2 did, but if you're coming to the product for the first time, it really is a great release. Highly recommended. Definitely the best Mac client out there, and they have a good iOS app too, along with solid Dropbox syncing. (Haven't tried their Windows version.)

Those terrible meaningless PDF names, along with wanting to automate grabbing BibTeX from online databases (mostly ACM and IEEE for me), were the main drivers for writing BibDesk, a Mac OS X reference manager: http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/

I started it back in ~2002 or so, and it's been kept running by a small group of contributors ever since.

Not a multi-user or web-based solution, but it has accumulated quite a few features (including searching many databases) that can make keeping a personal BibTeX file up to date much less of a pain.

Flow, while not open source, is a modern and social version of these types of tools.

https://flow.proquest.com/

Your OS doesn't support full text search of PDFs?

PDFs don't necessarily support that. Some PDFs draw a lowercase i by drawing two filled shapes, more draw it by calling a function that draws two filled shapes. And, yes, some draw it by invoking 'i' in a font.

To badly paraphrase Star Wars, "your confidence in your friends is your greatest weakness". Pdf sucks, it's little more than a glorified 2d graphics api that happens to be used mostly for content that should be represented as text. Except that there are dozens of ways to make stuff look like text, but without the advantages.

This is true for some PDFs but not for academic ones produced by PDFLaTeX.

If you're really suggesting what I'm reading into your post, which is that 'academic pdfs' are somehow some sort of glorious special species because everybody in academia uses latex and all publications are typeset using that, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

Does yours detect which part of the full-text is an author name, which is journal and which is publication date (mind the reference section present in practically every paper)? Does it index the notes you made on them?

Dam - I wish I had this during University!!!

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