#863 automatic pdf metadata extraction single/bulk mode
Dear devs and community of bibdesk,
thank you for the amazing tool and job you've done in creating and maintainig bibdesk.
I personally use it on a daily basis and has become and indispensable part of my workflow.
Nevertheless, I feel that lately bibdeks is lacking behind in many areas compared to aother bibliographic managers, for instance such as zotero/mendeley etc.
I am truely missing the features which would allow me to focus on the actual task at hand and not how to hack the tool in order to achieve. certain tasks
Although this ticket is for automatic metadata extraction from pdfs I'll try to also point other features in this ticket instead of opening 10 separate tickets.
1) Let me start with a personal, example I had accumulated 600 pdfs and it was about time to put some order, but just looking at the shear number of pdfs this seemed like an impossible task to do in bibdesk since it doesn't support autmatic pdf metadata extraction neither single nor bulk/directory mode.
Instead I had to use zotero to achieve this task and it worked pretty darn well, it only missed 20 pdfs out of 600 for wihch it couldn't fetch metadata.
Now this is what I would call productivity mode when the tool get's out of your way and you forget that you're even using it.
2) The other thing that I'm missing is the hierarchical categorisation, for instance if you have papers from the general field of statistics you mignt end up with an hierarchy like the following in your file system.
stats
|
|-----probability
|-----statistical physics
|-----statistical mechanics
|-----etc...
Even though this structure might be represented in the folder directory of my pdfs, I still cannot represent it in bibdesk, pretty much all other managers allow for such a thing, and no keywords and flat groups are not the same and don't allow for abstract organizational thought of the papers.
3) Another nice addition would be to have some kind of browser plugin that allows to quickly add the bibtex entry along with its pdf from within the browser while you're viewing the current website/pdf
I know that bibdesk allows to browse and add entries from within bibdesk through the split pane browser mode but it doesn't add the associated pdf with the entries plus it disruptes the workflow since you'll have to switch from your browser to bibdesk while it would have been easier for the user to achieve the same task through the browser since as a browser has more capabilities than the built in in bibdesk plus it doesn't disrupt any workflow and allows you to be more productive.
4) It would be an additional bonus to have a system of automatic note extraction from the pdf added to the bibtex entry or to allow for notes to be taken where one can use directly latex math and formulas
5) Finally, the plugins system is great but I keep wondering if it would have been greater if the language choice wasn't to idiosyncatic AppleScript but instead something generic like python with a huge library ecosystem.
One might ask why don't you switch to other managers if you find them to suit you better?
Well it's not that easy, I use a mac laptop and ipad in order to be mobile and a linux box for my desktop all these have to somehow talk to each other and here'rs where I had another difficulty.
Which is the Bsdk-File field. Again this is one of those exoctic things that works only in bibdesk and I had to spend time to translate those automatically in File field values so that I can load ny .bib file in another manager on my linux box, It would have been better if bibdesk would have handled those things automatically at the time of linking files to entries it should have created and populated the equivalent File filed since .bib databases cannot be tighed only to one specific mangaer, they are meant to be universall among managers that's why the bibtex language is very specific and structured.
Thanks in advance for you time!
Regards,
K.
Please be specific. Generic RFEs will just be ignored. I cannot go into explainin g all the problems in all of these requests here, that really becomes too much.