Re: [Bibdesk-users] Help with sharing PDFs in Bibdesk?

[Christiaan H. <cmh...@gm...>]

On Jul 18, 2012, at 23:16, Charles Turner wrote:

> Hi all-
> 
> I thought I'd figured this out, but it seems I'm caught on the return
> trip. Please excuse if I haven't provided enough info. Lemme know
> what's missing. Running Lion and latest release of Bibdesk.
> 
> What I'm trying to do is use Bibdesk on two computers via a USB stick
> that has all of my PDFs on it. I'm not using Bibdesk's autofile
> features, they're turned off.
> 
> I'd read somewhere that if the PDFs had the same relative position to
> the .BIB file, that Bibdesk could find and remake the aliases it
> stores in the .BIB file.
> 
> To that end, I have the following setup:
> 
> Computer A/Users/me/Documents/Build/primary.bib
> 
> PDF/author_name/author_name_date.pdf
> 
> Computer B/Users/me/Documents/Build/primary.bib
>                                                   PDF/ (symbolic link
> of: Computer B/Volumes/USB/PDF)
> Computer B/Volumes/USB/PDF/author_name/author_name_date.pdf (This is a
> removable USB stick)
> 
> I use Chronosync to keep things synchronized:
> 
> Computer A/Users/me/Documents/Build <-> Computer B/Users/me/Documents/Build
> Computer A/Users/me/Documents/PDF <-> Computer B/Volumes/USB/PDF
> 
> . . .
> 
> When I open the .BIB file "primary.bib" on computer B, Bibdesk chugs
> away and makes all the links so that I can access the PDFs on the USB
> stick. But when I move the changed .BIB file back to computer A, it
> can't find the PDFs resident on its HD in ~/me/Documents/PDF. But it
> does find them on the USB, if it's mounted on Computer A.
> 
> So if I had to answer my own question, it seems like Bibdesk can
> change the file locations on the move to Computer B because of the
> symbolic link, but then it must store a new relative location, such
> that now Bibdesk is expecting something off of /Volumes on the return
> to Computer A.
> 
> . . .
> 
> So is there a better way to accomplish what I'm trying to do? As I'm
> almost finished with my dissertation :-) it wouldn't be the end of the
> world to share the USB between the two computers, but there's some
> small convenience in maintaining two separate copies of the PDFs.
> 
> (I know I could use Dropbox, but I'm not so excited about that choice.)
> 
> Thanks for your interest!
> 
> Best, Charles

You should sync the files such that the PDF files are at the same relative location wrt the local .bib file on both computers, without symbolic links (because those will be resolved if necessary). So:

Computer A/Users/me/Documents/Build <-> Computer B/Users/me/Documents/Build
Computer A/Users/me/Documents/PDF <-> Computer B/Users/me/Documents/PDF

Christiaan