On Feb 13, 2014, at 17:06, Eamon Ferrey wrote:
> Thanks, Christiaan. I really appreciate it. I'll pass along an update when I
> get a chance to work on this during the weekend.
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Feb 12, 2014, at 20:13, Eamon Ferrey wrote:
>
>> That's promising to hear, though I've never written a script before, so
>> though that's likely outside of my realm of expertise. I'll see if can cheat
>> a little and get Keyboard Maestro to do some of the heavy lifting.
>>
>> Yes, all of the Pdf's have been renamed. It's a problem I'm trying to manage
>> even with the backup .skim notes that did make it to the new computer.
>> Bookends has a rename attachment feature according to some specific format
>> [(e.g. Name. "Title" (Date of publication)], which is what I used after
>> entering the relevant reference data. Since I was operating under the
>> assumption that the files still had their skim EAs, I didn't consider that
>> the renaming would break the automatic link between each pdf and it's .skim
>> file. So, for example, I have newly named pdf -Ridout, <Travis N., and
>> Brandon Rottinghaus. “The Importance of Being Early- Presidential Primary
>> Front-Loading and the Impact of the Proposed Western Regional Primary.”
>> (2008)> with a .skim file (based on the previous pdf file name) <ridout-
>> being early>. And I didn't stick to any standardized pdf naming convention
>> in my old 'setup' so my file name formats are quite variable.
>>
>> So it still seems there will be no magic bullet to link the .skim files i
>> will (hopefully) be able to generate from steps 1&2 to the right pdfs.
>> Bookends renames the pdfs according to the entered reference fields inside
>> the program, not any metadata associated with the file, so I wouldn't be
>> able to instruct whatever tool I use to name the extracted .skim files
>> according to the same format as the pdfs are currently named.
>>
>> I take your point about writing multiple .skim files to the same pdf. That
>> makes sense.
>>
>> Eamon
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 5:59 AM, Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> On Feb 12, 2014, at 11:19, Eamon Ferrey wrote:
>>
>> > Hi,
>> > I was wondering if there's any method for reading all the pdfs in a
>> > selected folder and for files that have skim notes in the extended
>> > attributes, exporting/converting/creating .skim files based on them. I
>> > think what I have in mind is something like the skimalot script, except
>> > using some of the functionality of the skimnotes command line tool.
>> >
>> > A few weeks ago, I copied my entire pdf library (a couple thousand) to a
>> > new computer, using the wrong usb drive (one not formatted to keep EAs). I
>> > didnt realize I had done this until after I completed an extremely time
>> > consuming process involving restructuring my entire pdf library, linking
>> > it to Bookends, manually inputting the reference info for hundreds of
>> > pdfs, renaming them, and so on. So I'm in a bit of a tricky situation. I
>> > have all of the pdfs with EAs still on the old computer. If I hadn't sunk
>> > weeks into this setting up my new system, I'd just copy the files over
>> > properly and start again, but I'm hoping there's something that will be
>> > slightly less time consuming that could get me out of the mess.
>> >
>> > I had in mind something like this:
>> >
>> > 1) scan all the pdfs on the old computer, finding all the ones that have
>> > skim annotations in the EA. (I have a couple thousand pdfs, but only a few
>> > hundred are annotated with skim)
>> > 2) Batch export .skim files from the EAs.
>> > 3) Move those to the new computer and write them to the appropriate pdfs.
>> > (I'm not sure any batch process will be possible with this since all the
>> > pdfs on the new computer now have new file names so I'm guessing even in
>> > the best case scenario I'd have to manually identify which .skim files and
>> > pdfs belonged together.)
>> >
>> > Not sure if any tools exist for these steps, but crossing my fingers that
>> > at least some of the process could be automated. Any thoughts?
>> >
>> > Also, can multiple .skim files be written into the same pdf? It seems that
>> > for some period of time I had the auto backup skim notes prefernce
>> > checked, and those files made the transfer to the new computer, but I'm
>> > not sure how incomplete or outdated these are. Just to be safe, it'd be
>> > ideal if I could write those to the pdfs as well as the .skim files I will
>> > hopefully generate from the pdfs on the old computer.
>> >
>> > Any leads at all would be tremendously appreciated. i'm not optimistic,
>> > but perhaps there's something I haven't thought of. Thanks again.
>> >
>> > All the best,
>> >
>> > Eamon
>>
>>
>> It should certainly be possible to write a script to automate this process,
>> at least in part. It is easy to get .skim files from the PDFs that have
>> notes. It is basically what the skimalot script does with the "bundle"
>> option, but using the "get" option for skimnotes in stead of "convert". That
>> would get you 1 & 2. How those should be exported and moved to the new
>> computer in batch I am not sure, because it depends on your configuration
>> and where you really want to get them. Are you saying all PDFs have been
>> renamed? If they have the same name, but only have a different base
>> location, you could just move them in batch by doing a simple replacement in
>> the path.
>>
>> And you can't write multiple .skim files to the same PDF, I don't even see
>> why you would want that (you'd probably get multiple copies of the same
>> notes.) It would be better to check first in the script if the .skim file
>> exists, and only convert when it doesn't, so you don't overwrite it.
>>
>> Christiaan
>
>
> Attached is a little script that could help you. Use it as:
>
> /path/to/skimnotesget pdfdirectory skimdirectory
>
> where pdfdirectory is a root directory for your PDFs you'd like to scan, and
> skimdirectory is a (nonexisting) directory where the .skim files will be
> dumped. It will mirror the directory structure of the PDFs inside that
> directory. You could run that on your old system, and than archive and copy
> the skimdirectory it to your new system.
>
> HTH
> Christiaan
>
I have put an improved version of my script on the Wiki
<https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/skim-app/index.php?title=Shell_Scripts#User-contributed_Shell_Scripts>,
it's called "skimget" now.
Christiaan
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