Dear Daniele, For all the good reasons you mention (and some others) I do not keep the large master file in the Dropbox. Even more importantly, my precious repository of pdf’s that goes with that master file, is also way too large to fit into my Dropbox. In cases where I needed to have the same master file and the same pdf repository on more than one computer, I am using syncing apps. However, for a particular project such as the writing of a scientific paper I use excerpts. If you go to my website<https://www.sysecol.ethz.ch/people/andreas.fischlin.html> you find at the bottom links to software I offer, where you also find many BibDesk AppleScripts that support the extraction of excerpts, with or without the accompanying pdf’s, including some syncing back utilities. The latter are of interest to me, since I like to read pdf’s on my iPad. Yet, again my collection is too large to have all on the iPad. Thus I also make excerpts, e.g. one on a particular topic, to myself, to go to the iPad. The metadata of an excerpt are typically all in a website created from the currently in BibDesk selected references. That website can be read on the iPad and its links to pdf’s can be used to open and read the pdf’s. For the excerpt you could use a Dropbox folder, but I actually use today a derivative of owncloud for syncing such an excerpt among all involved devices. On the iPad to actually read I use GoodReader, which I like for its excellent features, in particular for annotations. The latter are precious, the reason why I use sync back utilities to overwrite in my master collection the newly annotated pdf’s. The only discipline required on the user side is to not read the same paper on two devices at the same time. Otherwise only the pdf copy that received the most recent annotation on any of the used devices is going into the collection. But I find that discipline easy to observe. If I want to switch devices, e.g. stop reading on the iPad and continue reading on the Mac, I always first run the sync back utility from within BibDesk before opening the pdf.
Regards, Andreas ETH Zurich Prof. em. Dr. Andreas Fischlin IPCC Vice-Chair WGII Systems Ecology - Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics CHN E 24 Universitaetstrasse 16 8092 Zurich SWITZERLAND andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch<mailto:andreas.fisch...@env.ethz.ch> www.sysecol.ethz.ch/people/andreas.fischlin.hml<http://www.sysecol.ethz.ch/people/andreas.fischlin.hml> +41 44 633-6090 phone +41 44 633-1136 fax +41 79 595-4050 mobile Make it as simple as possible, but distrust it! ________________________________________________________________________ On 23/08/2020, at 12:00, Daniele Avitabile <d.avitab...@gmail.com<mailto:d.avitab...@gmail.com>> wrote: Dear All, I'm relatively new to BibDesk, and I am trying to improve my workflow. I have tried to search for this information but could not find it, so feel free to redirect me to the documentation, or other discussions. It seems so basic to me that I'm almost sure it's been discussed plenty of times before. I plan to build a master file, a large collection of entries, that I will keep in order, with many pdfs, sublists, etc. This master file will live in a Dropbox folder. However, when I'm writing a paper, I only need some of these references, and the corresponding .bib file lives next to the .tex sources. It's a local file. I will most likely share this file with collaborators, and clearly I don't want to expose my master file. How do you typically work in this setup? Do you keep the master and the local file open, and drag references from one to the other? There's something smarter to do? Am I missing something? Thanks Daniele _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-users mailing list Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net<mailto:Bibdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-users
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