pdf management software

A brief overview of software for managing your collection of pdf documents and articles. Acrobat, DtSearch and Mendeley are featured; other software is mentioned.

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this is an overview of some software
that can help you manage you're reaping
collection as well as your annotations
serve
PDF files so the traditional way of
dealing with three princes to photocopy
them
out over Journal and then do hand
annotations and highlights and maybe
make additional
notes on index cards today's version
is only slightly better than that and
which you download a PDF file printed in
and do the hand annotation and then
worry about filing
the problem with the system is that
after a while you collect hundreds or
thousands of paper documents which take
up a lot of space and take up a lot of
effort to maintain and to find that one
article that you read year and half ago
and wanna find it again
eventually that system breaks down and
you get
something like this so software comes to
the rescue
and I've broken the problem down into
three pieces
one is software to help you carry out
electronic versions of PDF annotation
and secondly
software to help you search and index
your
PDF collection so you can find those
articles again and then lastly something
that's emerging as integration of these
PDF search and indexing programs with
bibliographic software
to output your bibliographies for final
published papers
okay PDF annotation the to love
choice probably the King to lose
Adobe Acrobat cost some money but it's
quite powerful it can
allow you to right on the phone tronic
version of the article to highlight text
to put notations inside those texts or
on the document itself probably the most
powerful although
programs intended for annotations PDF
files
I years ago people talked about a
paperless office that really hasn't come
to play but this is
were moving slowly in that direction so
Adobe Acrobat
probably the top program cost some money
there are free versions of programs that
can do some annotations so some other
ones that I've
got wind over things like pdf-xchange
Viewer
Evernote mandalay PDF annotator and
OneNote
very they're free your at nominal cost
sometimes are included in enough sweets
I'll have more to say about mandalay
and it has some additional advantages
for
indexing software I think ever know also
allows you to search index
your PDF collections as well writing
using using this a standard computer
with mouse
to annotate PDF file since not as
convenient as using a highlighter and
pen
however tablet computers have been
making this
job easier closer to what paper
annotation with them
and then and highlighters and in
particular there's a
program called I annotate for iPad it
seems to
bring you one even closer to the paper
experience
well so let's say you've collected year
hundreds of thousands of articles
some which you've taken the time to
annotate now how do you find those
articles
there's a series of programs that are
intended for that
and I've listed some of these some of
them are our platform dependent so
on Windows for them caught my attention
I'm
using DT search and I'll have a few
things to say about that
have also experimented with the program
called mandalay
which I im impressed with in addition to
that era has some other capabilities
mandalay and is promising and last one
is Google Desktop which allows you to
index and search your files are on your
desktop
and that has the advantage to being free
but it doesn't have quite the
capabilities of some of these other more
dedicated programs
on the Macworld some other programs
that have caught my attention although I
have got direct experience with some of
them
senti is an important one papers is
recommended by some
and then the Mendelian Zotero programs
which
operate both and a browser so in the
cloud
and also some other families have
desktop versions
and the last thing I wanna just mention
is sometimes useful to
sink your PDF collections across
computers that say
one at home and one in your office or
maybe a couple in your office
programs like Dropbox on Live Mesh have
been and useful for those purposes
let's talk a lot talk about the indexing
and searching programs and I'll talk
about to them
firsters DT search this contains two
modules one
indexes let's say a file for love PDF
or folder full of PDF files a
works it quite quickly and up and then
I'll second program allows you to search
that
setup files and you can search it with
complicated
search criteria for example an author's
name and
Anna topic keyword in this case I've
searched my two thousand files for the
authors Abbott Gina and the keyword
silent lookin and found some
19 files in my to
collection 2000 files fulfill that
criteria
where both those terms are mentioned and
this is what the DT search window looks
like
so at the top one sees a
from listing of the articles and they
are ordered by criteria
some hit criteria can like go a BLAST
searches works other
hi either the ones with a highest
frequency of its
shows up at the top and networks goes
downwards
in the bottom panel you can see the pro
the
chose the the file it's in a Adobe
format and you can page through it and
search through it in
do some various things you can do with
Adobe Reader fact
this is a it uses the Adobe Reader
client inside the program
so DT search I found really quite useful
for searching files and I've been using
it for us
several years and can recommend it
men delay is another one that I've just
recently discovered in seems to be quite
powerful and have some additional
features that the Tea search doesn't
have
so with Mandalay you import your file
and what it does is it tries to read
them in
man creates a secondary database will
I'm which includes the authors names in
the journal and other citation
information so that shown on the
right-hand panel here
in the middle panels. the list of
articles and then
I'm I it allows you to search the list
of articles and then sort them by
various criteria
so if we search for examples I love grew
can we find
a.m. number of articles shown here in
north central panel
we can filter them by for example that
title other publications
we can add notes to individual articles
we can tag them
so this information and notes from tags
and somebody's
keywords and things that's maintained
outside
the PDF file itself you can also mark a
file
for let's say for example you want to
come back and read it a few
market it's easy to find it again you
can tag it with a certain topic him
and very easily than find any
files that you've tagged with that topic
okay Zotero has something does something
fairly
somewhere other haven't quite figured
out how Zotero works it seems to be
working in a different way than mental
a.m. may be a little tougher to grasp
isnt is cover on the Mac platform has
got a lot of good words on
found in the Internet seems to be a very
powerful on them
and papers is another one I mentioned
already that you can sync your
PDF collections and with programs like
Dropbox in Live Mesh mandalay allows you
to sync across computers also
and in some people prefer to use
something like remote desktop connection
or
related cancer programs which allows you
to access
let's say your office computer from your
home computer directly
that assumes you've left your office
computer on and has gone into hibernate
mode
and a also certainly have nice fast
connection
okay the last thing I want to talk about
is the trend towards
merging these programs which index and
search your PDF collections
so basically manage them with
programs that are intended for
bibliographic output and for citation
for basically handling the job
writing a manuscript and putting
references in it and putting the
bibliography in a
finalize form for publication
Miami search so far says that none of
the programs
really are quite satisfactory yet
mandalay Enzo tear are supposed to have
plugins that Kim
do what and no Reference Manager can do
they can
insert citations into a paper and create
a bibliography
but the bibliographic format
at this point is in satisfactory in
general so they have a few formats
a that are worked out but as anyone
who's read newspapers
or pay papers for publication Nos every
journalist has a different
particular formatting staffers
bibliography
and mend lanes on terror at this point
still don't handle those
adequately you can export the database
admin layers a tear
to a file that you can then import into
EndNote Reference Manager and then use
those programs for ever
final publication the involves extra
steps
I think in a year's time or so these
programs will improve to the point where
they can be
actually useful as a bibliographic
software essentially replacement
for and no to reference manager but
that's not the case
at this moment so to summarize what I
said
there's number programs for a PDF
annotation
a number of possibilities for for
searching and indexing your PDF
collection when they get
into the numbers have hundreds and
thousands and then finally
in time some these programs such as
mentally and so tera
will be merging the capabilities for
indexing and searching
with other capabilities such as
bibliographic output
that's what I have to say hope you get
something out of it