Saturday 29 May 2010

Organising publications using KRename

I have to work with lot's of scientific publications at the moment. That means, I have a large directory with many PDFs that are related to my work. Sometimes, it is cumbersome to find the right PDF or publication to look something up. Of course, I could rename every PDF after I downloaded it by hand, but - you might guess it - I am to lazy for this.

But help is in sight! I added a plugin to KRename, which can rename files based on meta-data included in PDF files. Organising a large set of publications is now a matter of adding the PDF files to KRename and using the template "[pdfAuthor] - [pdfTitle]". Convenient, isn't it? The screenshot below shows KRename while renaming a few PDF files.



The supported tags are [pdfPages] (number of pages), [pdfProducer], [pdfTitle], [pdfSubject], [pdfKeyword], [pdfCreator] and, [pdfAuthor]. If you have an idea for further meta-tags, do not hesitate to contact me. It should be quite easy to add more information, the current implementation is a matter of 10 lines thanks to the PoDoFo library used.




A pity is that many PDF authors do not add proper meta-data to their PDF files. So, if you are writing on a publication at the moment, please make sure you add your information to the PDF metatags.

This feature is currently only available in KRename SVN trunk.