[QUOTE=rumirocks;413969]The PDF cutoff is something that can be alleviated with a setting. Everyone had that problem with the penultimate version. That was a year ago and I can't remember what it was. Check the forum?

As for comments, hit the "i" icon and add everything there. Then it makes search, WHICH YOU SHOULD BE DOING FROM THE TOOLS MENU because it has more choices, much faster and better. Pose your question to the forum for suggestions. I barely know how to use the program but I dump everything into it.

Do the short online tutorials and look for Bill de Ville's comments in the Forum. Their forum is a goldmine. Check out the Devon Academy.

Lots of freebie programs to download that helps you with DT. Their firm is very security-conscious and they're conscientious.

I would think that if they are scientific papers, then a person should know how to select them from a list of keywords similar to selecting photos out of iphoto.

You can put tags on the pdfs and then recall them based on the tags YOU define. What could be more convenient than that?

Maybe 'critical' was too strong a term. It's really more of an inconvenience when viewing (or searching) through multiple papers. iTunes' inability to search through the text of the PDFs is more of a problem.

I know that Spotlight can do that, but I'm still running Panther (Sherlock may be able to do it too, but I want an app that organises the papers as well). DEVONthink can do that, plus I like its ability to automatically suggest appropriate groupings based on how existing papers were grouped. The only problem is that it isn't designed with scientfic papers in mind, so there is no way (other than the gerneric comment field) to include multiple authors, journal name, pages in the journal, date published, etc. I've gone with making lots of groupings to cover these fields, but it's very time-consuming!


I think the Panther version is older than the Tiger version, so it may still contain bugs which no longer appear in the Tiger one. I'll check the forums though to see what they say.


Skim lets you write comments anywhere on the PDF, as if you were writing on a paper copy. Unfortunately, it requires Tiger.


There is a high likelihood that any given scientific paper may contain a lot of things I'd like to recall. While using comments to add general topics of the paper is useful, anything more would become cumbersome. Also, I don't really want to spend a lot of time adding keywords and tags to a paper, when the majority of the information is already contained within the document itself.



For what it's worth, I'm also using BibDesk now to do my BibTeX database -- I used to do it manually, which was OK when I had less than 50 papers. The downside is that it can't search through the content of the PDFs, only the tags.