

Ask HN: How do you organize your pdf library? - gbrindisi

I have a directory full of papers, books and random documents and I am experiencing hard times in organizing them. Expecially now that the number of files is near huge it's really difficult to perform a succesfull and efficent search.<p>So do you have any suggestion to share? Tips, tricks,  apps or whatever useful is welcome!
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crocowhile
I know that people who use MacOSX love with passion a software call "papers".
Some people use mendely or zotero.

I am a Linux user and I use an opensource software called bibus.
<http://bibus-biblio.sourceforge.net/> It works crossplatform and it also
serves as endnote alternative for citations, in case you need one. It does
integrate with pubmed but not in the perfect way (somewhere in my todolist it
says "fix bibus-pubmed interaction").

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throwaway112
OS X user here... and its true. I used Papers extensively to manage academic
papers.

<http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/>

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revorad
For research papers, Mendeley is excellent - <http://www.mendeley.com/>

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messel
I use a similar broad topic based folder organization on both my dropbox ebook
folder, and in my iBooks collections.

On Kindle it's just one big mess, but I don't have as many books in the Kindle
yet (a dozen or so).

I use the same idea for Instapaper folders.

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russjhammond
I load everything into Evernote. It scans your PDFs and makes the contents of
them searchable, even images with the PDF will be searchable if they have
text. Plus you can always open any PDF in Evernote with your viewer of choice.

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runjake
You can add PDFs to iTunes. I add them in iTunes and hit Get Info and apply
titles, authors, dates, tags, notes, etc. It's not perfect, but iTunes makes
fairly decent PDF library thingy for me.

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zem
keep an eye on <https://github.com/abhijith/cxr> \- a friend of mine is
writing it to solve the same problem, but with a "search, don't sort"
approach.

