PDF Tools I Use
toolsPDFs are a staple of academia and industry, but they're neigh-intolerable without the following:
- Foxit Reader - I've used Foxit for years; it's plain better than Adobe, allowing all sorts of commenting, highlighting, and manipulation tools that Adobe restricted.
- PDF XChange - I was first encouraged to it by Docear and find it as capable as Foxit. Recently I needed to OCR a scanned book; Foxit doesn't have this in their free version but PDF XChange does, so it's nice to have multiple tools.
- Both of the preceding allow you to replace the document colors; pure inversion of white & black is an improvement, but I typically reduce the contrast by choosing a ~50% gray background and black text. Without this change you end up staring at a 200W light bulb all day...
- PDF reDirect - This is a pdf printer with a gui. The gui makes it easy to batch combine and/or re-order pages in pdfs. So as long as we have to communicate in PDF, this is a useful utility.
- ...and some things have to be done by ghostschript (Unix). Four lines of python, a call to gs, and a secured PDF no longer prevents highlighting and commenting.
And because 1000s of PDFs in a hierarchy of folders is a huge pain, I use both Mendeley Desktop and Docear to manage organize the library.
I'm not content with either: Mendeley is owned by Elsevier, so it should be avoided; Docear is open source, having lots of feature requests and understaffed (volunteer) developers. I'll keep Mendeley around until Docear has a good cross-library pdf text search. I love how visual Docear can be, I just wish it was able to auto-categorize. Some of the most useful views are the most tedious to create by hand: consider a web showing who cited whom - the info is in the .bib and in the DOI/Google Scholar link but isn't currently brought in and presented. Since Docear's open source and written in Java, I should be able to see how this might be done...perhaps this summer.