Greetings!

I have a folder on my computer that is packed with over 4,000 pdfs of various sizes (most are academic journal articles, but some are scanned books / pdfs of over 100 megs), and the number of pdfs in this folder is growing daily. I have been using the heretofore stable Ultra Recall for quite some time to link and view these pdfs, but recently UR has been freezing up, and I haven't been able to find the reason, though I will keep trying on Kinook's Forum.

Be that problem as it may, I was wondering if there any good alternatives to UR. I realize there are dozens upon dozens of PIMs and the like that can do this, but I would like to hear from the Forum experts about some of the most stable and robust outliners when it comes to linking and viewing (and searching) very large numbers of pdfs.

Do you know Mendeley?
http://www.mendeley.com/features/
It's not an outliner but still worth of checking if you work with PDFs.

Best regards!

W.

Tried Mendeley some years ago, then lost interest. Citavi is great (http://www.citavi.com/ but too expensive. Qiqqa is intriguing.

*@ basilides:* You might be interested in this.
I have trialled the reference management programmes Zotero and Mendeley, but I found they did not meet my requirements.
I have recently started trialling another reference management programme called Qiqqa, which blew me away - it scans and indexes text-searchable PDF files and PDF files containing images - i.e., it OCRs any text in the images in the PDF files.
I installed Qiqqa on my HP Envy i7 laptop, and then let it loose on my library of about 650 PDF documents. I left it scanning and indexing the lot overnight.

It successfully OCRed and indexed all the imaged PDF files too. It seems quite intuitive to use and has lots of good features, though it is still under development.

There's a good list and comparison of "reference management software" here:
Comparison of reference management software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software

On the Qiqqa website, there is a good comparison between Qiqqa, EndNote, Zotero, and Mendelay, :
Qiqqa Features
http://www.qiqqa.com/About/Features#Compare

The OCR capability stands out as a strength for Qiqqa.

Well, have you tried EverNote - the premium version? It can OCR PDF files and is great for organizing them anyhow.

Regarding Qiqqa, it is as I said, a very intriguing and cleverly designed program, though not aesthetically. However, it's OCR-ing feature is not nearly as good as ABBYY's.

Mendeley is much improved, and may be worth checking out again.

Daly

basilides wrote:

Tried Mendeley some years ago, then lost interest. Citavi is great
(http://www.citavi.com/ but too expensive. Qiqqa is intriguing.

The problem with Mendeley (they should change this name: whenever I see it I am reminded of Dr. Death, Josef Mengele) is you get only 1 gig of free space, and I have about 40 gigs of pdfs, and the number is growing! Plus you have to mess with groups and the like. You are right: the program has gotten better, but not exactly what I need, considering the large number of pdfs I have, and I don't want to spend a fortune for cloud space.

I have a folder on my computer that is packed with over 4,000 pdfs of
various sizes (most are academic journal articles, but some are scanned books / pdfs
of over 100 megs), and the number of pdfs in this folder is growing daily.

Have you considered using Google Docs. It you can upload folders full of document, optionally converting them to text. Either way, it is searchable and you can create a tree of labels. As a bonus, it is easy to have documents in more than one places in the tree (simply assign more than one label

Pierre

basilides,

I was a UR user who experienced a problem with UR freezing constantly after upgrading to the latest version of Internet Explorer on my PC. The problem went away when I went back to an earlier version of IE. Could that be your problem?

Google Docs! Well, who knows when Google will decide to dump this feature, plus I would have a lot of uploading, converting, slicing and dicing, etc. My point, to repeat -- I have a folder crammed with mostly academic journal pdfs of various sizes (some quite large: 100 megs, for example) (pdf folder total so far: 48 gigs!). I need a robust, reliable program where I can quickly link thousands of these pdfs and view and search them rapidly via a stable browser that doesn't crash. Is this asking too much?

Mark, I'm using FireFox 5, and I am having the same UR freezing problems. It is probably the fault of these bloody browsers, and not UR. I am tired of fiddling around with them, though.

It sounds like you might want to use AtlasTI, qualitative data analyis software.
It could be used to code and co-relate hundreds of PDF, assign codes or notes to blocks of text, pictures, video etc.

It seems amazingly powerful. I'm just beginning to use it myself.

For a note-taker, I'm using TreeDBnotes, but I'm thinking of switching to something more serious like UltraRecall or MyBase.

With a combination of open- source Zotero, Ultra Recall, AtlasTI and the open source mind mapper FreePlane, I don't really need any other tools to manage my data and references.
Try out FreePlane. Its quite remarkable.

Not to belabor this, but it doesn't matter what browser you actually use, but whether the latest version of IE is installed on your computer because UR uses IE as its browser.

I'm with you on being tired of fiddling.

Hi basilides,

I didn't test it by myself, so I can't say anything whether it's stable, easy to use or has all features you demand, but it reads as if it might be interesting for you:
It's called pdf-explorer and available via

http://www.rttsoftware.com/pdfe.html

Best regards

Achim

As far as I know, you don't need to be involved with groups on Mendeley.

And though I am not sure, I don't think you're obligated to use their cloud. I am speculating, but I suspect one could use the desktop version of M, and use a cheaper, such as Dropbox.

Daly

basilides wrote:

The problem with Mendeley (they should change this name: whenever I see it I am
reminded of Dr. Death, Josef Mengele) is you get only 1 gig of free space, and I have
about 40 gigs of pdfs, and the number is growing! Plus you have to mess with groups and
the like. You are right: the program has gotten better, but not exactly what I need,
considering the large number of pdfs I have, and I don't want to spend a fortune for
cloud space.

I opened qiqqa for the first time in a while, and was promptly reminded why I hadn't used it: the text in my PDFs has lost its sharpness. If I have to read for any time, there'd be eye strain. Mendeley is easier on the eyes. I'm not sure what would cause the difference.

Daly