CRIMP Alert: A Compiled List of PDF Managing and Search Tools

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Feb 7, 2008 at 08:33 AM

Derek Cornish wrote:
>It is very difficult to decide how best to handle pdf files - whether to leave them in
>their Windows folders and index and search them, or to keep them within specialized
>container programs (many of which don’t do a very good job of searching them, but at
>least keep them tidily in one location).

I have little difficulty in deciding myself. I have always opted for leaving them in (a few) permanent windows folders and indexing/linking to them from database programs such as UltraRecall or whatever. The sheer size of the files is such that it would make no sense to include them _within_ a file.

For me PDFs fall into the greater category of media files, which includes image and audio files, as well as video which I barely use. I have a folder called Library (with various subfolders) with all my electronic versions of books and related references. My PDFs alone are several hundreds of megabytes. My audiobooks are several gigabytes.

Apart for the size issue, I believe that files as such will be accesible for quite some time, whereas database programs come and go. Think of the time involved in importing such files to a database and then exporting them to one’s next information manager.

That said, information is not knowledge. A library of references makes little sense unless one invests in slowly building their comprehension of the ideas within that material, i.e. their knowledge, whether visually (with mind maps etc) or textually (with a classic outliner). For this I find many of the tools we discuss in this forum absolutely invaluable.

An indexing program complements the building of such an ‘idea structure’ by helping reference and support themes, once one knows what they are after. Personally, I was attracted to Archivarius by its support for an amazing multitude of file formats, as well as for my own working language which is often unsupported by anglosaxon made/oriented software.

Cheers
alx