Yep, organize your PDF files with CC licenses!
From time to time I see an app that just makes me want to purchase a Mac.
Some time back I wrote a post about a fantastic app called Papers that was the perfect app to organizer… err… papers! (Winner of the 2007 Apple Design Award for Best Scientific Computing solution!)
I’ve been looking for something similar for Windows or Linux for quite a while, but nothing really reaches it’s high standard. Until I ran across a blog post mentioning a PDF organizer app called Yep. That’s right, Yep.
Although Yep is not as scientifically directed as Papers, it looks like a great application (for Macs – grrrr!).
So, my search continues for something similar to these fantastic looking apps. Anyone know about a good piece of software to help organize my papers in a decent fashion? Suggestions are appreciated!
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UPDATE: I’ve found a great piece of software to help me organize my papers, it’s called Mendeley. I highly recommend it!
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And while we’re talking about PDFs, let me take this opportunity to write about a cool PDF converter I’ve recently discovered.
There are a bunch of PDF converters out there, some proprietary and others open source. However, I’d like to call your attention to this particular (FREE – as in beer!) PDF converter called CC PDF Converter, and it allows you to embed Creative Commons licenses in your newly created documents. How cool is that!?
Related posts:
I’ve been for while wanting to talk about Zotero on my blog, but haven’t come around to it yet. It’s a (multiplatform) firefox extension, that I’ve been using to organize papers. One can extract meta-information directly from scientific databases (if that’s the case), as well as organize things using tags. I suggest you give it a try: http://www.zotero.org/
Thanks for the info. I already use Zotero. I’ve been using it for quite a bit now, but it doesn’t seem to feel the same as what Papers has to offer. Not even close.
I need something to organize all the papers I have on my hard drive. Although Zotero does do a good job, it gets quite sluggish in some situations.
That’s quite true. It’s the best one I found yet though. I’ve also used referencer for a while, but I found some very annoying bugs that made me to stop trusting it.
Well, it’s not free, but I’ve been using EndNote for some time now, and couldn’t live without it anymore!
Argent23, thanks for the tip. It looks pretty good with decent interation with Office too, but the price is absurd. For that price I could purchase a used Mac and still buy Papers! haha!
[...] reading this post, I decided to write this one just to remember that I have to put my bibliography into bibtex [...]
I’ve access to a EndNote license through the university, and it does work ok, but not being able to run it on both linux and windows is a big disadvantage for me.
Hi people, happy new year! Have been struggling to find a simular program to Papers for windows – without success! But, I recently discovered that you can use iTunes to organise pdf documents the same way as it organises your mp3 files. Its not a perfect solution as the fields are obviously geared towards music rather than storing documents – but it does allow you to add meta data lik tags to articles and use a ‘read-list’ like a ‘play-list’. And, it’s free!
But im still looking for a solution which offers what Papers does for mac users – frustrating that someone hasnt produced such software. Good luck with the quest!
It would be fantastic to have such an application for linux and windows. Why is that such nice applications are there only for os X. Is it true that majority of researchers use mac-osx?
When I realized my hard disk was being invaded by an ever-growing pile of PDF files, and it was increasingly harder to find a particular paper, I started searching for a (free) app to help me with that problem. I finally came across JabRef, an open source bibliography reference manager that runs on Java (so it’s cross-platform). I’ve been using it for about a year now, and it really works great. It manages your references in BibTeX format and is quite flexible. You should definitely give it a try!
Have you taken a look at Referencer for Linux? It’s not as nice as Papers, Yep, or iPapers, but it seems to do the job. Also, has anyone looked at trying to compile iPapers (open source) for Linux using the APIs from GNUstep? I haven’t really had a chance to play with it but it seems plausible that it would work.
Hello Ricardo,
if you’re still looking, maybe a project I’m working on (excuse the plug) might be a step in the right direction?
Mendeley (www.mendeley.com) aspires to be a mixture of paper management and collaboration goodness ;-) We like to think of it as a “Last.fm for research”.
There’s a demo video on our website, as well as on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ct4O0Ect18
[...] have an award winning software application called Papers (not free) that is all the rage or even Yep (free?), the Linux gang have some options like Referencer that did a decent job of organizing and [...]
what about http://gpapers.org/ ?
I use YEP on my home computer and am very happy with it.
At work I use a Windows machine. I discovered that Adobe Bridge (bundled with Photoshop etc.) can index, organize, tag, and preview PDF’s much like YEP. It is so useful that one of the academics I work with bought a copy of Photoshop solely for using Bridge as a PDF manager! I’ve often wondered why Adobe don’t create a stand-alone PDF management app, or atleast release a cut-down “express” version of Bridge.
Hey Luciano, I didn’t know about Bridge. Thenks for mentioning it. I suppose it only started coming with the latest versions of Photoshop, right?
Well, Papers exists because there are very nice and easy to use tools to manage pdfs in OSX, as well as simple tools to create the visuals and GUI of Papers. It will take a larger effort to do something like this in Linux, with the added disadvantage that many Linux programmers are more engineering than design oriented — therefore, they are more prone to creating akward but powerful instead of simpler but easier to use applications. But that’s just my $0.02, I love Papers and since I changed institutions and don’t have a Mac anymore I am forced to try and make do with my Dell/Linux box…
Another nice thing on the Mac – you can make math margin notes in latex, and paste them into the .pdf (and the postscript is pasted, not a bitmap).
More specifically, use latex eqn editor, type your margin note,
drag/drop into a PDF editor such as pdfpen.
Possible (I imagine) because the mac display system is based on pdf.
I have used EasyArticles for a number of years. It works pretty well. Looking for a linux replacement now…..
gpapers–nice find!
Try Nuance’s Paperport, although I am not sure it supports tags. I used in on Windows for years, right from when it was first packaged with the Visioneer scanners (Visoneer sold the software business). When I went to the Mac I started using YEP which was the nearest thing I could find. My key requirement was to NOT have the organizer alter the file system structure. Many products do and introduce a database to boot. Neither Paperport nor YEP do this.
have you tried “Adobe digital editions” its no so great as papers but works good
http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/
[...] papers in Linux by paulasimoes on November 20, 2007 After reading this post, I decided to write this one just to remember that I have to put my bibliography into bibtex [...]
I recently purchased “PDF Stacks” for my PC (Windows 7) after trying and liking their free demo. I conduct a lot of research at my university so I have seamlessly organized all my medical journal articles and PDF files into collections. I can also search databases such as PubMed and Google Scholar. I suggest you give it a try if you are running a PC: http://www.pdfstacks.com