Dear Andreas and Christiaan,
On 28.10.2009, at 14:43, Andreas Fischlin wrote:
> Thank you for bringing this up. I find this question pertinent to
> the use of any ebook reader: Can I smoothly excerpt some of my pdf
> collection, preferably together with meta data onto a reader or not?
> This is for me the key question whether to even consider buying an
> ebook reader. Of course, because all these questions are for my
> knowledge unanswered, I have so far shied away from getting any
> ebook reader.
The only device I know is the Sony PRS 600, and it seems to be
generally capable to do this, however neither Sony's library manager
nor other available programs that I know of are good at it.
> However, there are other comments you made, that I didn't quite
> understand: Perhaps you are interested in solutions for extracting
> from a BibDesk data base together with the pdf's. I have written
> such an AppleScript ("Extract Bibliography.scpt") that creates a
> self-contained folder together with an index.html file and all the
> associated pdf's. Example:
>
> http://se-server.ethz.ch/Staff/af/Fi159/
>
> I am happy to send you the script, if that's what you are interested
> in.
Well, that won't do the trick as there's still the gap of getting the
metadata into the device.
Sony use an XML file manage both the library and the metadata (e.g.
notes and highlights). I've created an export template + postprcessing
script which will create an XML snippet which should contain all the
neccessary information for the reader. However, this does not work for
all my library items, and it is not clear why it doesn't work for some.
I haven't been able to find a reference for how the XML file is
supposed to look like, so I just took hints from what it would look
like if I added PDFs with Sony's software.
This brings me to Christiaan's comments:
> I don't have an ebook reader, so I don't really know what you mean
> with ebook reader support. What would you want BibDesk to do, so what
> does an ebook reader need?
I'd like to use BibDesk to push my PDFs to the reader, preserving as
much metadata as possible. That would include obvious stuff such as
author/title, keywords (which the PRS 600 uses in form of
'collections') and even Skim notes.
I.e. BibDesk would need to be able to read the reader's XML data (to
convert notes from the device into Skim notes) and write it. Of
course, every device will be different supporting only a subset of all
available data. The developers of Calibre (written in Python) use
plugins for different devices. The fact that I don't speak Python has
kept me from understanding how support for the PRS 600 works...
> As for PDF metadata, that is pretty useless in practice, because it's
> almost always filled with meaningless junk. BibDesk cannot change the
> PDF metadata, this actually changes the PDF data. Though perhaps you
> mean something different when you talk about PDF metadata? For
> instance, I don't know what AppleScript properties you're talking
> about.
I did indeed mean the data stored in the PDF file. It seems you can
read it with AppleScript, but not set it.
The PRS will read PDF metadata if it finds a new PDF file on its
filesystem.
If I could write author/title information into the PDF, I could just
drag the PDFs on the reader and have meaningful data without modifying
the library file on the device (but of course still lacking other
information such as notes, keywords, dates).
Sorry if this all sounds a bit confus(ing/ed). I'm happy to explain...
Jonas
>
> Regards,
> Andreas
>
> Jonas Zimmermann wrote:
>> Dear All,
>>
>> Just a couple of days ago I got myself a PRS 600 ebook reader. I'm
>> very keen to get my BibDesk PDFs on my new device. First of all,
>> the Sony eLibrary manager seems to be quite useless, as it doesn't
>> even allow simple metadata changes of PDF files, so my titles and
>> authors are whatever the publishers chose to fill the fields with,
>> usually DOIs or rubbish data.
>> I then came across Calibre, which seems to be able to fill lots of
>> different ebook readers and is basically an ugly incarnation of
>> BibDesk without Bibtex support.
>>
>> Is there a way to populate PDF metadata from BibDesk? The
>> AppleScript properties seem to be read-only ...
>> If there was a way, however, another nuisance would be that
>> Calibre insists on keeping its own library of PDFs, so I would end
>> up with a copy of all my papers. I would not want to change my
>> current system and move to a probably less stable document
>> management with Calibre, so I guess my ultimate question would be:
>> Is ebook reader support feasible with BibDesk? Calibre is open
>> source and seems to rely on plugins to support different reader
>> platforms, so could that source probably be tapped?
>> I could imagine that the availability of more ebook devices
>> (welcome, nook, plastic logic [?]) which due to their ability to
>> add notes can be seriously used in a scientific workflow will
>> eventually lead to many people using BibDesk wanting to have their
>> libraries on such a device.
>> What are your thoughts on this, and does anyone else use an ebook
>> reader peace- and successfully with BibDesk?
>>
>> Best,
>> Jonas
>>
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