Julio:
> But then I need to search on the comments of all the books that I
> read. not just one by one.
>
> Do you know a software that can take all my notes with the pdf and
> be my database in order to search for certain text on the comments
> or highlighted phrases and jump to the pdf?
>
> What do you suggest to do to work in research?
I suggest that you work in a flavor of Unix - macOS or Linux are most
popular these days. There are TONS of tools, mostly open source.
You can put together tools in scripts run from the command line
("Terminal" in macOS).
For your problem, you first need a basic tool to convert the PDFs to
text. I use pdftotext which is part of this package of tools:
http://www.xpdfreader.com/
I wrapped pdftotext into a script (unfortunately tcsh):
https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/ftp/pdf2txt
so that I could always have the two flags -nopgbrk and -layout :
pdftotext -nopgbrk -layout "$1"
tcsh works but isn't the best language. You probably can use python
or another scripting language.
You will have to edit files. I recommend vim since it is extremely
efficient once you are used to it (I'm typing this in vim).
https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/vim.html
Once you have the PDF to text basic tool working on the command line,
use vim to make a script that has a loop that will go through all the
files.
In Unix you can use the command 'file' to determine that a file is a
PDF. Then you can 'open' (on macOS anyway) once you have the one you
want.
If you search a lot, you might want to store the text versions and use
an 'if' statement to check whether you have a copy already. You could
even record the date of the PDF to see if it was modified later than
the text, if so you would update the text ... these scripts can get
quite sophisticated but start out simple.
Tom
Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
Senior Investigator
National Institutes of Health
National Cancer Institute
Center for Cancer Research
RNA Biology Laboratory
Biological Information Theory Group
Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201
[email protected]
https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms.
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