PDF Management and electronic bibliographies

Just wondering how people manage their collections of PDF files and
downloaded electronic documents on their computers? Up to now I have
been maintaining a nice filestructure and naming files well, and I have
folders like iir_equalisation, wireless_channel_modelling and so on.

I also have a TO_BE_FILED folder in which I have tons of PDFs I just
havent gotten round to filing, and its starting to look like a
mountainous task. I was thinking of just dumping all my PDFs in a
single folder, and trying to organise them by keywords or metatags, but
I dont know if this is easy...

Does anybody have any recommendations about how I should go about this?
Software I should look at?

cheers...

porterboy76@yahoo.com wrote:

> Just wondering how people manage their collections of PDF files and
> downloaded electronic documents on their computers? Up to now I have
> been maintaining a nice filestructure and naming files well, and I have
> folders like iir_equalisation, wireless_channel_modelling and so on.
>
> I also have a TO_BE_FILED folder in which I have tons of PDFs I just
> havent gotten round to filing, and its starting to look like a
> mountainous task. I was thinking of just dumping all my PDFs in a
> single folder, and trying to organise them by keywords or metatags, but
> I dont know if this is easy...
>
> Does anybody have any recommendations about how I should go about this?
> Software I should look at?

I also had a nice directory structure, but after a few years of
downloading and copying PDFs, it is hopelessly cluttered. Only one
thing helped: Google Desktop.

Regards,
Andor

On 5 Nov 2006 05:57:34 -0800, porterboy76@yahoo.com wrote:

>Just wondering how people manage their collections of PDF files and
>downloaded electronic documents on their computers? Up to now I have
>been maintaining a nice filestructure and naming files well, and I have
>folders like iir_equalisation, wireless_channel_modelling and so on.
>
>I also have a TO_BE_FILED folder in which I have tons of PDFs I just
>havent gotten round to filing, and its starting to look like a
>mountainous task. I was thinking of just dumping all my PDFs in a
>single folder, and trying to organise them by keywords or metatags, but
>I dont know if this is easy...
>
>Does anybody have any recommendations about how I should go about this?
>Software I should look at?
>
>cheers...

Get one of the indexing applications: windows desktop search, yahoo
search or google desktop search. The only problem with that is the
scanned PDFs which don't index so you have to give them long &
desriptive names when you save but directories are no longer
necessary.

"Andor" <andor.bariska@gmail.com> writes:

> porterboy76@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> Just wondering how people manage their collections of PDF files and
>> downloaded electronic documents on their computers? Up to now I have
>> been maintaining a nice filestructure and naming files well, and I have
>> folders like iir_equalisation, wireless_channel_modelling and so on.
>>
>> I also have a TO_BE_FILED folder in which I have tons of PDFs I just
>> havent gotten round to filing, and its starting to look like a
>> mountainous task. I was thinking of just dumping all my PDFs in a
>> single folder, and trying to organise them by keywords or metatags, but
>> I dont know if this is easy...
>>
>> Does anybody have any recommendations about how I should go about this?
>> Software I should look at?
>
> I also had a nice directory structure, but after a few years of
> downloading and copying PDFs, it is hopelessly cluttered. Only one
> thing helped: Google Desktop.

I've also noticed that pdf documents have "keywords" in their document
properties, but I don't know of any software that actually goes inside
the pdf file format and searches for keywords. Does Google Desktop do
that?

By the way, I have also been able to establish those keywords and
other document properties in my LaTeX documents using hyperref using

\makeatletter
\hypersetup{pdfauthor=xyz}
\hypersetup{pdftitle=xyz}
\hypersetup{pdfsubject=xyz}
\hypersetup{pdfkeywords={xyz}}
\makeatother

Hopefully, some day, it will pan out.
-- 
%  Randy Yates                  % "Remember the good old 1980's, when 
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC            %  things were so uncomplicated?"
%%% 919-577-9882                % 'Ticket To The Moon' 
%%%% <yates@ieee.org>           % *Time*, Electric Light Orchestra
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 18:24:16 GMT, Randy Yates <yates@ieee.org> wrote:

>"Andor" <andor.bariska@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> porterboy76@yahoo.com wrote:
>>
>>> Just wondering how people manage their collections of PDF files and
>>> downloaded electronic documents on their computers? Up to now I have
>>> been maintaining a nice filestructure and naming files well, and I have
>>> folders like iir_equalisation, wireless_channel_modelling and so on.
>>>
>>> I also have a TO_BE_FILED folder in which I have tons of PDFs I just
>>> havent gotten round to filing, and its starting to look like a
>>> mountainous task. I was thinking of just dumping all my PDFs in a
>>> single folder, and trying to organise them by keywords or metatags, but
>>> I dont know if this is easy...
>>>
>>> Does anybody have any recommendations about how I should go about this?
>>> Software I should look at?
>>
>> I also had a nice directory structure, but after a few years of
>> downloading and copying PDFs, it is hopelessly cluttered. Only one
>> thing helped: Google Desktop.
>
>I've also noticed that pdf documents have "keywords" in their document
>properties, but I don't know of any software that actually goes inside
>the pdf file format and searches for keywords. Does Google Desktop do
>that?

Actually it does better than that. Google Desktop, Windows desktop
search, yahoo seach, copernic etc. extract all the text from the PDF
files and index them. You have to install IFilter for PDF (available
from Adobe) to make that possible though.

Randy Yates wrote:
...
> I've also noticed that pdf documents have "keywords" in their document
> properties, but I don't know of any software that actually goes inside
> the pdf file format and searches for keywords. Does Google Desktop do
> that?

Sure - it's the same thing like Google (notice how it returns content
of PDFs / MS DOC and PPT etc. in the search results), just on your
Desktop. And it's incredibly fast - as you type, it returns matches,
much faster than searching via hyrarchical structures (such as file
directories). Including your E-Mails /  Webmails. Really very useful.

Regards,
Andor

"Andor" <andor.bariska@gmail.com> writes:

> Randy Yates wrote:
> ...
>> I've also noticed that pdf documents have "keywords" in their document
>> properties, but I don't know of any software that actually goes inside
>> the pdf file format and searches for keywords. Does Google Desktop do
>> that?
>
> Sure - it's the same thing like Google (notice how it returns content
> of PDFs / MS DOC and PPT etc. in the search results), just on your
> Desktop. And it's incredibly fast - as you type, it returns matches,
> much faster than searching via hyrarchical structures (such as file
> directories). Including your E-Mails /  Webmails. Really very useful.

Unfortunately it's only available for Windoze OSs - I run linux (FC4). 
-- 
%  Randy Yates                  % "Ticket to the moon, flight leaves here today 
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC            %  from Satellite 2"
%%% 919-577-9882                % 'Ticket To The Moon' 
%%%% <yates@ieee.org>           % *Time*, Electric Light Orchestra
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

On 05.11.2006 14:57, porterboy76@yahoo.com wrote:
> Just wondering how people manage their collections of PDF files and
> downloaded electronic documents on their computers? Up to now I have
> been maintaining a nice filestructure and naming files well, and I have
> folders like iir_equalisation, wireless_channel_modelling and so on.
> 
> I also have a TO_BE_FILED folder in which I have tons of PDFs I just
> havent gotten round to filing, and its starting to look like a
> mountainous task. I was thinking of just dumping all my PDFs in a
> single folder, and trying to organise them by keywords or metatags, but
> I dont know if this is easy...
> 
> Does anybody have any recommendations about how I should go about this?
> Software I should look at?
> 
> cheers...

Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabref.
It organizes PDFs wrt to filenames associated to the bibtex entry, but
regardless of the folder structure on the HD.

J.

Thanks for all your replies...

I hadn't thought of using Google Desktop or equivalent, so thats a step
forward for me anyway. There was talk of this not working for scanned
documents, unless OCR (optical character recognition?) was used.
Problem is that eg IEEE have a lot of very old, scanned PDFs on
IEEEXplore, not all of which were scanned with OCR and there is not
much I can do about that. I presume Google Desktop would have major
problems with that right?

I like the way mp3 files are handled in iTunes, there is just a big
folder with all the mp3s, and the artist, album, genre, date, title
etc. are all embedded tags in the mp3 file. Something like that would
be great, but if there are no meta tags in the original PDF file, is it
possible to edit the file to insert them?

Randy Yates wrote:
> "Andor" <andor.bariska@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Randy Yates wrote:
>> ...
>>> I've also noticed that pdf documents have "keywords" in their document
>>> properties, but I don't know of any software that actually goes inside
>>> the pdf file format and searches for keywords. Does Google Desktop do
>>> that?
>> Sure - it's the same thing like Google (notice how it returns content
>> of PDFs / MS DOC and PPT etc. in the search results), just on your
>> Desktop. And it's incredibly fast - as you type, it returns matches,
>> much faster than searching via hyrarchical structures (such as file
>> directories). Including your E-Mails /  Webmails. Really very useful.
> 
> Unfortunately it's only available for Windoze OSs - I run linux (FC4). 

Have you tried Beagle? It does pretty much the same work as Google 
Desktop. It isn't quite as slick and fast, but is really nice for 
finding stuff on your hard drive.

Cheers

Marc