Find and attach doesn't work for me

[dspady]

When I try to use the command Get PDF: Find & Attach local pdf, the program searches for the name and date of the publication, but not the title, and all my documents are entered as titles (It is quite silly to list them as authors, as some authors; e.g. Jones, could have 50 citations for any given year and it is impossible to easily separate them out).
MY QUESTION is "How do I get the Find & Attach to search my document library using the title as the search item.

Thanks

Don

[Jon]

The Get PDF -> Find & Attach Local PDF does not search for pdf file names. It uses Spotlight to try to find pdfs whose content matches some of the metadata in the Bookends reference (e.g. author, title, etc.). Because of limitations of Spotlight, it's not always successful.

Jon
Sonny Software

[macula]

That explains why most of my attempts to "Find & Attach" have been unsuccessful. There may be room for improvement, though, as Spotlight provides a number of specialized specifiers for refining searches. Among them is

Code: Select all

name:

which triggers searches exclusively within filenames, effectively ignoring file contents. It is conceivable that Bookends could include such a search request in the "Find & Attach" routine, in addition to the search request that is already built in.

[Jon]

There is no good way I can think of for automating search by file name based on the reference metadata -- what content in the reference would Bookends use? By searching for content it can use the authors, title, etc., which should all be in the pdf. There are no rules for file names.

Jon
Sonny Software

[dspady]

When I search for a file in spotlight, using the title name, spotlight finds it. It finds a ton of other junk also, but that is OK, I can filter that out manually.

Don

[Jon]

Bookends searches for a number of things other than the title, to increase the signal to noise ratio -- I don't users to have to sort through "a ton of other junk". It works pretty well in my experience.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

Having said that, I could possibly offer two choices in a Get PDF -> From Local HD -> (1) Smart Search (2) Title Search

??

Jon
Sonny Software

[macula]

That could indeed turn out to be a terrific 'middleground' solution. As to why 'title searches' may at times be more effective than 'smart searches', just think of non-OCR'ed scans of books and photocopied articles. Such PDFs are quite common in the humanities (although virtually non-existent in other fields, e.g. medicine), and they are impervious to any sort of 'smart search' since there is no text within them whatsoever. This is why I tend to store significant amounts of metadata in my filenames and/or Spotlight comments. And it would be absolutely wonderful if Bookends where able to take these metadata into consideration when attempting to "Find and attach."

Many thanks.

[Jon]

I wasn't thinking of a file name search, which would work 0.01% of the time (and you may be in that 0.01%), but using just the title metadata when searching pdfs for content. This is in response to the post by Don noting that there are times a less specific Spotlight search might find references the more specific misses, and the user select the correct one.

Such searches of course will not find pdfs without textual content, but they can be attached any number of other ways.

Jon
Sonny Software

[macula]

Oh, I see.

Well, I do belong in that 0.01% (an old and probably counterproductive habit). I would bet that the your percentage is pessimistic (looking at it from my end), but I agree, probably not large enough.

I had never noticed that PDFs include a 'title' field in their metadata. Assuming that the major online repositories utilize it, the proposed feature certainly sounds like a great idea.

[Jon]

The 0.01% I meant was the number of people who use the entire title of the ms as the file name. A piece maybe, but not the entire title. So even for those who make use of the article title in the file name (I don't know how many, but a small minority I'm sure), since most of *them* won't use the entire title, such a search would fail.

Also, Spotlight doesn't search pdf metadata. It searches pdf content. The title should always be present in the pdf, and that's the search I refer to above.

This doesn't seem to be generating a lot of general interest, though.

Jon
Sonny Software

[dspady]

I make a habit of using most or all of the manuscript title as the file name. It makes it much easier to find a file if you are just browsing the library with Finder (for e.g.).
On a related topic, when I am entering data into a bdb record and want to put an attachment on it, I go to Attach file and finder pops up and I start typing in the file name. Two little irritants:
1. Sometimes the finder doesn't go automatically to my default library folder. IS THERE any way to make it do so.
2. The finder looks for text anywhere and I need to click on file name to make it default its search to the name of the file. Is there any way to set file name as the default for finder to search.

[dspady]

I make a habit of using most or all of the manuscript title as the file name. It makes it much easier to find a file if you are just browsing the library with Finder (for e.g.).
On a related topic, when I am entering data into a bdb record and want to put an attachment on it, I go to Attach file and finder pops up and I start typing in the file name. Two little irritants:
1. Sometimes the finder doesn't go automatically to my default library folder. IS THERE any way to make it do so.
2. The finder looks for text anywhere and I need to click on file name to make it default its search to the name of the file. Is there any way to set file name as a default for finder to search.

These are piddling concerns. I really like Bookends.

Don

[Jon]

I make a habit of using most or all of the manuscript title as the file name. It makes it much easier to find a file if you are just browsing the library with Finder (for e.g.).

The file name would have to be the entire title (punctuation not necessary) for it to work.

Yes, there could be a very, very specific find and attach for files with names that exactly match the title in a ref, but as I said this would work in a small number of cases, and I don't plan on adding such an option to Bookends.

On a related topic, when I am entering data into a bdb record and want to put an attachment on it, I go to Attach file and finder pops up and I start typing in the file name. Two little irritants:
1. Sometimes the finder doesn't go automatically to my default library folder. IS THERE any way to make it do so.

No, because Bookends doesn't know what your default library folder is (it knows the folder that the current open library is in). But why would it look for pdfs there? I, for example, exclusively download pdfs to the Desktop and attach from there.

In any case, if you have a specific folder where the pdfs you are attaching are usually found, simply add it to the sidebar in the Finder and you can get there with one click.

2. The finder looks for text anywhere and I need to click on file name to make it default its search to the name of the file. Is there any way to set file name as a default for finder to search.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Is this a Finder Spotlight question? If so, Shift-Command-F is supposed to do that (but oddly it's not for me at the moment).

These are piddling concerns. I really like Bookends.

Thank you.

Jon
Sonny Software