PDF storage software recommendations?

[Michael Grünewald]

Hi all,

Polytropon wrote:

> On Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:24:52 -0700 (PDT), Bill Tillman<btillman99 at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>> But put me
>> down for a vote on this method using simple text files and awk.
>
> It JUST WORKS - that's the goal. It can be developed and configured
> very fast, can easily be extended (or limited), and data is stored
> in a STANDARD (!!!) format which allows you to do ANYTHING with
> it. You can even provide a web-driven interface for the database,
> even that is possible.

I use for my work a solution matching Polytopon's suggestion, it sounds 
very to natural to the UNIX user in me :)  I am a scientist and have to 
daily deal with an increasing amount of electronic papers, made 
available in PDF, DJVU, PostScript or even Tiff.  I organised my library 
so that each document get its own directory. Each directory then 
contains the document file(s) per itself and meta information,  stored 
along in files whose names are fixed (for instance +INDEX for general 
information, +BIBTEX for BibTeX fata, etc.).

I only need a couple of hours to write a program easing the addition of 
a document to the library and another one generating a HTML index out of 
the meta informations, and while my system is far from perfect, it 
exists, and helps me every day.

I also had to help colleagues in various ways with their computer, 
sometimes giving them some (seemingly) very unfriendly scripts I wrote. 
My experience with this, is that, provided I show these people how it 
works and supervise their first steps with the program, they can 
actually use it and like it, despite the fact that the experience 
offered by the program is at first not as nice to them as the one 
offered by a GUI.

However, being a scientist, I would not consider my working environment 
as `standard', whatever it means!

>> We have a Windows based system at my current job which uses
>> FileMaker Pro. It's amazing what we can do with this and it's
>> like having a gigantic electronic filing cabinet.
>
> Oh, the paperless office... an utopia - at least in Germany,
> bureaucracy's home country. :-)

I thought France was that :)  Rules are sometimes changing so often that 
administrative staff does not always has time to catch up them all! 
Nevertheless all of this bureaucracy is sometimes very useful too---but 
it is always a bit annoying ;)

Cheers,
Michael