Paperboy - a utility to rename a messy collection of pdfs

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Paperboy - a utility to rename a messy collection of pdfs ☶ release github.com
authored by instant 1 month ago | cached | 10 comments

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I wrote a command-line tool to help rename and move all those pdfs that pile up in everybody’s download folder. I often save papers to read them later, but since 90% of them have completely useless filenames, I found it impossible to find anything at a glance. Paperboy helps streamline the renaming and will move pdfs to a specified library folder.

I recently released version 1.0, which includes binaries for Mac & Linux, as well as a Homebrew package.

Let me know your thoughts!

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eb 1 month ago | link
I have a quite large library of papers, mostly from journals. A few ideas to consider:
- Allow to include fields in filename: I like to organize my pdfs by [Author] [Year] [Title]. It would be useful to allow the user to specify fields to use in the file name. This will help with retrieval of papers, because sometimes I remember the name of the author or the title.
- Allow to organize pdfs into folders: Once you start having a lot of papers (50?), scrolling through a single folder becomes chaotic. It would be useful to organize papers by the author’s initials or some other system (maybe tags).
- Integrate some sort of citation management database: This might be off, as you state that the goal of the project is a database-less pdf manager. This should be something straight forward to implement if you allow the user to input the main fields for the pdf.
Thank you for putting this tool out there. This is one of those things that I didn’t know I needed until I saw it. Good job!
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  instant 1 month ago | link
  
  Those are all great ideas, some of which (like subfolders and/or tags) are on my to-do list. My approach is to think really carefully about avoiding micromanagement and having a good UI. I’ll try to find a way of having the advanced features be more ‘opt-in’. Ideally advanced options like subfolders or different fields would not get in the way (or clutter the UI) if you decide to keep it basic.
  
  Note that you can already do [Author] [Year] [Title] in a pretty speedy way, you just won’t receive the renaming suggestions in that format. It might actually be a good idea to make one of the suggestions configurable like that, the limitation is often the lack of pdf metadata though.
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  nickpsecurity 1 month ago | link
  
  I do the first two. My filenames are Title Year Author since that’s order of importance for me. I also have subfolders just to cut down on the chaos. Some are organized, some are just a month/year combo. I don’t do citation management. It would be useful for academics, though. On that note, I just discovered Zotero yesterday on Hacker News with a ton of people saying they loved it. Worth checking out at least.
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chriswarbo 1 month ago | link
My own collection of PDFs is getting a little ridiculous:
```
$ find Documents/ -iname '*.pdf' | wc -l
2385
```
Most of these are stored with the original filename, which can be nice in some ways (e.g. I’ve often tried to save a paper off ArXiv only to be told the file already exists!), but as you say they’re often useless from a human/semantic perspective.

I’ll certainly take a look at PaperBoy to help with this.

For anyone interested, I wrote up some tips for managing PDFs, including links to a bunch of scripts (and a few snippets of my own): http://chriswarbo.net/projects/pdf-tools.html

It was written a few years ago, so unfortunately some of the links are broken (e.g. the Nix packages have probably moved to http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-packages.git now)
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eta 1 month ago | link

Holy crap, this is actually something I’ve wanted for such a long time! I can’t wait to test it out…
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sevagh edited 1 month ago | link
There’s a UX in some UNIX tools, not sure where or how it originated, but for example in youtube-dl, you can choose to save a video with some macros/aliases for the title, e.g.:
```
--output "%(uploader)s%(title)s.%(ext)s"
```
Could be cool here to provide things e.g. passing a %year-%author-%title format string (like some other commenters in this thread mentioned - I have no actual opinions on PDF naming).
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msingle 1 month ago | link

Looks very cool! Of course I see this literally 1 day after I finally go to the effort of installing zotero to keep track of academic-ish papers/pdfs that I have been accumulating.
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  instant 1 month ago | link
  
  Ha, that’s too bad, but I think that Zotero is on the other extreme of the spectrum in terms of features. I’d say Zotero is great if you have a need (or personal preference) to have a big organizational system, where you have lots of context, additional notes & citation management, super fine-grained filing, many more different file types etc.
  
  I wrote Paperboy to be the opposite: don’t force me to make too many decisions, just help me rename and move some files, then get out of my way :)
  
  I was actually motivated by this feeling that if I put a lot of effort into feeding a tool, then I can never get rid of it, because a) it has a lot of magic metadata somewhere, b) I feel like I invested so much time that would then have been wasted. Even worse when it has a slightly intrusive online-component!
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grahamc 1 month ago | link

Very cool program! So exciting to see .nix files already there!
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  instant 1 month ago | link
  
  Glad you like it :) All the .nix credit goes to nmattia, but let me know in the issue tracker if you run into trouble. Afaik it only works with the unstable channel (and we didn’t pin the nixpkgs version yet).