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Comparison with other tools

Why not JabRef, Zotero or Mendeley (or...) ?

  • JabRef (2.10) is nice, light-weight, but is not so good at managing PDFs.
  • Zotero (5.0) features excellent PDF import capability, but it needs to be done manually one by one and is a little slow. Not very flexible.
  • Mendeley (1.17) is perfect at automatically extracting metadata from downloaded PDFs and managing your PDF library, but it is not open source, and many issues remain (own experience, Ubuntu 14.04, Desktop Version 1.17):
    • very unstable
    • PDF automatic naming is too verbose, and sometimes the behaviour is unexpected (some PDFs remain in an obscure Downloaded folder, instead of in the main collection)
    • somewhat heavy (it offers functions of online syncing, etc)
    • poor search capability (related to the point above)

Above-mentioned issues will with no doubt be improved in future releases, but they are a starting point for this project. Anyway, a command-line tool is per se a good idea for faster development, as noted here, but so far I could only find zotero clients for their online API (like pyzotero or zotero-cli). Please contact me if you know another interesting project.