Robert McNees
This is my periodic post asking if anyone has found anything better than Papers for managing pdfs on Mac. Something native, that can actually look up metadata and get it right, that behaves the way you expect when you type ⌘-F or ⌘-x or whatever.
(I can't believe I pay for Papers.)
Robert McNees
Alas, the Native part is really important. I know it's a failing on my part, but non-native apps just introduce a lot of friction for me.
Robert McNees
@knoppaz I really want to use it! But I think I'd still need to use something like Zotero to handle metadata and generate citations, right?
Knoppaz
@mcnees Maybe DEVONthink (https://www.devontechnologies.com/de/apps/devonthink)?
Robert McNees
Tried Zotero. (Looks like it uses gtk3?)
- Still struggling to find metadata for stuff that comes right up in Google scholar with a title search.
- With six papers open I can't grab the window's title bar, because it's filled with tabs. What??
- The pdf viewer is laggy on an M1 MBP. Especially gestures, like pinch-to-zoom.
Robert McNees
Mendeley, owned by Elsevier, is an obvious non-starter.
(Even so, I tried to take a look for the sake of comparison, and you can't even log in to the Desktop app. It just keeps sending you to a web login that doesn’t inform the app.)
Robert McNees
Some real, glaring problems with cross platform toolkits:
- They typically break some keyboard shortcuts by replacing expected behavior with something else. (To be fair, macOS has been breaking lots of its own expected behaviors over the past few versions.)
- The handling of pdfs is often choppy or laggy. I'm seeing that here. My 12 year old 1st gen iPad handled pdfs better than a lot of modern cross-platform desktop apps, because the software was thoughtfully optimized for the hardware.
Joel LeBlanc
@mcnees I don’t know your exact problem, but BibDesk is amazing (https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io)
Robert McNees
Looking at Bookends, and really pulling for it, but... trying to match a book chapter, and google scholar searches that work in a browser are coming up empty when I try to autofill metadata. Nothing coming up for authors named "Witten" or “Weinberg”.
On top of that, full screen is sort of a mess. This is one thing Papers gets right. But to open new pdfs in Bookends while in fullscreen mode I have to switch from compact view to widescreen view and then back. That seems wrong!
Robert McNees
Basically, my complaint is that I want the old @mekentosj version of Papers, which worked pretty well and didn't have most of these problems.
I hope those developers got paid when they sold to Springer, because their software has been absolutely ruined.
Robert McNees
@jwleblan Yeah, I have used it to manage bib files before, and maybe I just need to switch back over. But I'd really like something all-in-one that handles the library, viewing, annotation, bibtex and other ref export, etc. Just doesn't seem to exist anymore outside of poor cross-platform tools.
Robert McNees
@jwleblan (Thank you for the rec, though. Always encouraged to re-try things when I hear about them working well for others!)
Joel LeBlanc
@mcnees Did you know that it handles the library, and will automatically open selected files in your default viewer with a single keystroke? I don’t think it has format export features (beyond scripting BibTeX to act on selected files. Good Luck 👊
Robert McNees
@gvlx Further up in the thread. Trouble retrieving metadata, non-native Mac app is choppy with PDFs. Lots of other weird little inconsistencies which I think you chalk up to being just a ref manager rather than a full Library manager.
Gerardo Lisboa
@mcnees @mekentosj how is your experience with zotero (don't know if it has a native version for your platform)?
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