Organizing PDF attachments

[Rocky Vega]

It is possible to automatically organize the attachments into a folder hierarchy? For instance if I import an article to my watched folder downloaded from Nature and that was published in 2012, can Bookends automatically create a subfolder "Year", than a new subfolder to "Year" named "Nature" and then move the article to this location? I have above 1000 references with PDF articles attached to those references and putting all those PDF´s into the attachment folder seems disorganizing for me. Moving from Sente to Bookends.

[Jon]

No, there is no such feature. Bookends can organize by *library* if you like (that is, you can set the default attachment folder to a subfolder in the main attachment folder for each library).

Jon
Sonny Software

[Rocky Vega]

Ok. I know Papers have this feature. Hope you can consider this in a future upgrade.

[Jon]

If you plan on managing pdfs yourself in the Finder then yes, it's a nice feature. But attachments in Bookends are meant to be managed by Bookends with the file organization being transparent to the user (like iOS). Besides simply looking at pdfs, you can have Bookends reveal pdfs in the Finder, email pdfs, export pdfs, search pdfs with Spotlight, open pdfs in the app of your choice, and probably a few other things that don't come to mind right now. I won't say I'd never add such a feature, but it's not a high priority (and, btw, it would degrade functionality because it would take Bookends longer to locate the pdf).

Jon
Sonny Software

[Rocky Vega]

I understand. Giving it a second thought, your reasoning seems very logic, I agree. Maintaining attachments with Bookends the need for a strict folder structure in Finder is unnecessary.

[ghostwheel]

Sorry to bring up such an old thread back from the dead. I would really like to have a feature where I could specify that a newly imported pdf attachment should be put in the main attachment directory, in a subfolder with the name of the first author, for example.
(It seems to me that it should be a trivial feature to add when renaming the pdf... just rename with [author]/REST_OF_CREATED_NAME).

The reason that I would really like to have this feature is that I read my articles on an android tablet, and annotate them there. With Papers,
I had all the pdfs stored in a library organised by first author, and then synced to dropbox. This way, on my android device I didn't need a
reference manager to find the articles - I just used author, which is anyway how I remember papers. Annotations are then automatically synced back
to the pdf.

I realise now that since Bookends will find the pdf anywhere in the attachment directory, I can just write a script that moves the files to the right directory after import... It would just be nicer if bookends did it...

Related to this script idea, I have the following question: is there a place with exact specifications of all the possible renaming schemes for PDFs bookends can use? I.e. exactly what filename I will get if I use Turabian Author-Date, or RIS, etc?

Thanks!

[Jon]

You'll get exactly what that format outputs for bibliographies (so you surely would not want RIS). The best way to do this is to create a format just for this purpose -- renaming PDFs. For example, if you want author-date you'd use

a d

and for author you'd probably tell Bookends to output surname only, and for two authors output an " and " between them and for 3 or more " et al.". But all that's up to you.

If you wanted author and title, it would be

a t

As for filing PDFs by some folder scheme, that's not likely to happen, there's a lot of overhead and complexity that's I'm not eager to add. If you can do this with a script, that's certainly the way to go for now.

Jon
Sonny Software

[ghostwheel]

Thank you very much. Wow! I hadn't seen the biblio->formats manager dialog. That's exactly what I wanted.