qapers

A simple bash script to manage your library of scientific papers

qapers is a simple bash script manages a library of PDF files by allowing the user to quickly find a file, open it in the default PDF viewer, and maintain a separate directory of annotations on each PDF file. You can use it to:

• Find a PDF file in a directory where you dump all your PDFs
• Pipe the results from the 'find' option to open a PDF of your choice
• Open a YAML annotations file to store your notes on the PDF
• Tag your PDFs using the YAML annotations file
• Review your previously stored annotations
• Export the bibliographic info of each PDF in BibTex format
• Export parts or all of your notes on any PDF in any format you wish

Features

Detailed feature description coming soon

Installation

Simply copy the qapers file from the repo to /usr/local/bin (typically requires sudo) and change user access rights to make it user executable.

Dependencies

You need to have the following two packages installed to get the core functionality right

• yq
  • yq is a lightweight and portable command-line YAML processor
  • https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/
• jq
  • jq is a powerful and versatile Command-line JSON processor
  • Should be available via the package managers of standard distros.
  • Installation on Ubuntu: sudo apt install jq

Optional:

• gvim
  • I also use vim-gnome (i.e., gvim) as my YAML editor for annotations, but GEdit (which is installed on most distros by default) should work just as fine.
  • The important thing is to have an editor that can be called from a script and that can open right at a specified line number of the given file.

Example Usage

Examples and different use-cases coming soon

TO DO

• Add more detailed features to README
• Add examples to README
• Add version numbering
• Add nautilus-sendto functionality
• Add set functionality to set environment variables
• Add bash completion
• Add Bibtex export

LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2020 Bedartha Goswami [email protected] This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.