Installation

Install papers

pip install papers-cli

Note there is another project registered on PyPI as papers, hence papers-cli for command-line-interface. The installed command is still papers.

Name clash with GNOME Papers

The GNOME Papers document viewer (the default viewer on recent GNOME desktops) also installs a papers command; with both installed, whichever comes first in $PATH wins. Two mitigations are built in:

• The package also installs the command under the unambiguous name papers-cli — call that, or set a shell alias (e.g. alias papers=papers-cli), on systems where the names collide.
• Because this command may mask GNOME Papers, papers somefile.pdf (a plain existing file instead of a subcommand) opens the file with the system's default viewer rather than erroring — which on a GNOME desktop typically launches GNOME Papers itself, so the viewer keeps working for the common case. Subcommand names always take precedence (papers ./list opens a file named list; papers list lists your library), and viewer-specific flags are not forwarded — call the viewer's binary directly for those.

Dependencies

• python 3.9+
• PyMuPDF (preferred) or poppler-utils (only pdftotext; deprecated): convert PDF to text for parsing
• bibtexparser: parse bibtex files
• crossrefapi: make polite requests to the crossref API
• scholarly: interface for google scholar
• rapidfuzz: calculate score to sort crossref requests
• unidecode: replace unicode with ascii equivalent

The Python dependencies are installed automatically with pip.