DE for scientists

[_Christian_Willberg_]

Hi All,

I first want to start off by saying how great DE is. I am a researcher at an academic institute and I am using DE not for ebooks but for reading and storing comments/notes on published scientific papers, as almost 100% of the literature I have to read is in PDF format. DE has allowed me go paper free by keeping the notes I make on each paper associated directly with with that paper. Which is perfect! Currently I have 405 papers stored with DE, a number that grows almost daily. I have a few questions, hopefully I am not repeating what others have asked already.

1st, Is there any way that DE could add new PDFs that are saved into a specified folder automatically, and create bookshelves based on the folder names? This would save a lot of clunky messing around in DE.

2nd, Is there a way to make DE use the file name as the title? Or edit the details of a particular PDF.

3rd, Would it be possible to group all the notes/bookmarks made in a particular paper/book together, and have them grouped in a way so that they could be exported as a txt file, or simply copied and pasted into another document?

4th, Is there any way to copy text or figures from a paper/book?

Many thanks,
Christian

[Guest]

No, No, No, and Yes (Text)

1 and 3 are great feature requests but are not currently in 1.0 and will not be in 1.5 (which is coming "real soon now")

For 2, we use the filename if the book does specify a title in the PDF metadata. Editing of metadata about a book in ADE is a long standing feature request that I really want to do.

For 4 as long as the book doesn't specifically disallow copying you can select text and copy away into the clipboard, but unfortunately we did not implement copy graphics into the clipboard.

However if you are up to tinkering there are partial solution for what you want for 2 and 3.
As always when tinkering with the non documented underpinnings of any program note 3 things: 1 - this won't be supported by Adobe, 2 -do this with ADE closed, and 3 - backup, backup, backup.

After a book gets added all metadata is kept in manifest.xml and this is treated as an authoritative source - so any changes in manifest.xml (such as changing the dc:title element for a book) will be reflected in the UI.

Also all notes are kept in the Annotations folder under your digital editions folder and each book has it's own .annot file. These .annot files are a fairly simple XML file. I've created a sample .php web page that will spit out all of the notes text for a .annot file in a simple HTML file put it up on my personal web site at: http://www.lesterfamily.org/ade/annots.html (front end, the actual .php is at http://www.lesterfamily.org/ade/upload.php - also Nothing gets saved on my server and am not really paying attention to hits, that'd be too much work 🙂 ). However just about any XML formatter tool will do however if you don't want to use mine.

--
Jim Lester
Adobe Systems.