Re: [Skim-app-users] batch create .skim files from pdfs (skim notes in EA)

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 06:27:07 -0800


On Feb 12, 2014, at 20:13, Eamon Ferrey wrote:

That's promising to hear, though I've never written a script before, so though that's likely outside of my realm of expertise. I'll see if can cheat a little and get Keyboard Maestro to do some of the heavy lifting. 

Yes, all of the Pdf's have been renamed. It's a problem I'm trying to manage even with the backup .skim notes that did make it to the new computer. Bookends has a rename attachment feature according to some specific format [(e.g. Name. "Title" (Date of publication)], which is what I used after entering the relevant reference data. Since I was operating under the assumption that the files still had their skim EAs, I didn't consider that the renaming would break the automatic link between each pdf and it's .skim file. So, for example, I have newly named pdf -Ridout, <Travis N., and Brandon Rottinghaus. “The Importance of Being Early- Presidential Primary Front-Loading and the Impact of the Proposed Western Regional Primary.” (2008)> with a .skim file (based on the previous pdf file name) <ridout- being early>. And I didn't stick to any standardized pdf naming convention in my old 'setup' so my file name formats are quite variable. 

So it still seems there will be no magic bullet to link the .skim files i will (hopefully) be able to generate from steps 1&2 to the right pdfs. Bookends renames the pdfs according to the entered reference fields inside the program, not any metadata associated with the file, so I wouldn't be able to instruct whatever tool I use to name the extracted .skim files according to the same format as the pdfs are currently named. 

I take your point about writing multiple .skim files to the same pdf. That makes sense.

Eamon


On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 5:59 AM, Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]> wrote:

On Feb 12, 2014, at 11:19, Eamon Ferrey wrote:

> Hi,
> I was wondering if there's any method for reading all the pdfs in a selected folder and for files that have skim notes in the extended attributes, exporting/converting/creating .skim files based on them. I think what I have in mind is something like the skimalot script, except using some of the functionality of the skimnotes command line tool.
>
> A few weeks ago, I copied my entire pdf library (a couple thousand) to a new computer, using the wrong usb drive (one not formatted to keep EAs). I didnt realize I had done this until after I completed an extremely time consuming process involving restructuring my entire pdf library, linking it to Bookends, manually inputting the reference info for hundreds of pdfs, renaming them, and so on. So I'm in a bit of a tricky situation. I have all of the pdfs with EAs still on the old computer. If I hadn't sunk weeks into this setting up my new system, I'd just copy the files over properly and start again, but I'm hoping there's something that will be slightly less time consuming that could get me out of the mess.
>
> I had in mind something like this:
>
> 1) scan all the pdfs on the old computer, finding all the ones that have skim annotations in the EA. (I have a couple thousand pdfs, but only a few hundred are annotated with skim)
> 2) Batch export .skim files from the EAs.
> 3) Move those to the new computer and write them to the appropriate pdfs. (I'm not sure any batch process will be possible with this since all the pdfs on the new computer now have new file names so I'm guessing even in the best case scenario I'd have to manually identify which .skim files and pdfs belonged together.)
>
> Not sure if any tools exist for these steps, but crossing my fingers that at least some of the process could be automated. Any thoughts?
>
> Also, can multiple .skim files be written into the same pdf? It seems that for some period of time I had the auto backup skim notes prefernce checked, and those files made the transfer to the new computer, but I'm not sure how incomplete or outdated these are. Just to be safe, it'd be ideal if I could write those to the pdfs as well as the .skim files I will hopefully generate from the pdfs on the old computer.
>
> Any leads at all would be tremendously appreciated. i'm not optimistic, but perhaps there's something I haven't thought of. Thanks again.
>
> All the best,
>
> Eamon


It should certainly be possible to write a script to automate this process, at least in part. It is easy to get .skim files from the PDFs that have notes. It is basically what the skimalot script does with the "bundle" option, but using the "get" option for skimnotes in stead of "convert". That would get you 1 & 2. How those should be exported and moved to the new computer in batch I am not sure, because it depends on your configuration and where you really want to get them. Are you saying all PDFs have been renamed? If they have the same name, but only have a different base location, you could just move them in batch by doing a simple replacement in the path.

And you can't write multiple .skim files to the same PDF, I don't even see why you would want that (you'd probably get multiple copies of the same notes.) It would be better to check first in the script if the .skim file exists, and only convert when it doesn't, so you don't overwrite it.

Christiaan

Attached is a little script that could help you. Use it as:

/path/to/skimnotesget pdfdirectory skimdirectory

where pdfdirectory is a root directory for your PDFs you'd like to scan, and skimdirectory is a (nonexisting) directory where the .skim files will be dumped. It will mirror the directory structure of the PDFs inside that directory. You could run that on your old system, and than archive and copy the skimdirectory it to your new system.

HTH
Christiaan

Attachment: skimnotesget.sh
Description: Binary data

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