Subject: RE: How do you organize your *.pdf files?

From: "Phil Hultin" <hultin=at=cc.umanitoba.ca>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 14:18:00 -0500

Daniel:

Acrobat already provides a tool to do exactly what you are talking about.
Note that I am using Windows, but I think the Linux versions of Acrobat
would do the same thing.

On the Tools... menu, select "Catalog...".  This will create an index of all
the words in all the pdf files in any specified set of directories, and save
it as a file that can be searched and which is hyperlinked to the source
file.

I have not used this function before, but I just ran the routine to create
an index of a bunch of PDFs of journal articles in three subdirectories on
my disk.  It indexed 131 pages from 25 documents in about 15-20 seconds.

You then use the "Search" command from the "Edit" menu to find files
containing text from within your index.  The list of "hits" is hyperlinked
and on clicking opens the paper in question in Acrobat.

Dr. Philip G. Hultin
Associate Professor of Chemistry
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3T 2N2
(vox) 204-474-9814
(fax) 204-474-7608
mailto:hultin=at=cc.umanitoba.ca
http://www.umanitoba.ca/chemistry/

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From: hinsen=at=llb.saclay.cea.fr
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 21:49:40 +0200

On 21.10.2004, at 19:33, Daniel Svozil wrote:

> I would like to know, if there is any free linux solution that would  
> help
> in organizing pdf files with the articles downloaded from the web. I  
> was
> looking for some application/script, but I didn't find anything.

I use Leo (http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html) for  
maintaining my personal bibliography database, with the help of a  
couple of Leo scripts that I wrote myself but that I'd be happy to  
share. The scripts import bibliography information from either Pubmed  
XML files or from ISI-format files (which I get from the Web of  
Knowledge). I only keep references to the PDF files in the database,  
they are not parsed or searched in any way. Searching the abstracts has  
proven to be enough for my needs. Once I have located an article, the  
reference to the PDF file makes it simple to open it.

The main reasons for using Leo were
1) I already use it for other tasks (programming, project management)
2) Its scripting facilities are very powerful
3) It doesn't enforce any particular data layout

Leo certainly has a higher learning curve than specialized bibliography  
software, but I found it well worth the effort, in particular if you  
use it for other tasks as well.

> and than to parse the text file for the information. But such a script
> would be very complicated, as format of text data differs journal from
> journal, and many possibilities would have to be taken into account.

Exactly.
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Konrad Hinsen
Laboratoire Leon Brillouin, CEA Saclay,
91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France
Tel.: +33-1 69 08 79 25
Fax: +33-1 69 08 82 61
E-Mail: hinsen=at=llb.saclay.cea.fr
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