[okfn-discuss] Mendely: limitations of PDF and PDF annotations

[Mr. Puneet Kishor]

On Dec 2, 2009, at 4:51 PM, Graham Perrin wrote:

> On 2 Dec 2009, at 19:40, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>
>> I'll definitely give Mendeley a try.
>
> A reservation re: Mendeley is its focus on PDF,

Yes, but not exclusively. Since v 0.9.4.1, Mendeley Desktop can

"
- Mendeley can now import PDF, Bibtex and RIS files which do
   not have the .pdf, .bib or .ris file extension.
- Mendeley will attempt to guess the type of the file in this
   case. Support for importing .txt files which may contain
   references in various formats.
- Support importing of month field from Bibtex where month
   name is not enclosed in quotes or braces.
- HTML attachments are now indexed for full text search
   (note that this will not apply to existing attachments)
"

(see http://www.mendeley.com/release-notes/v0_9_5/)

> which is not necessarily a good thing:
> <http://www.sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/adobe-bad-open-government/>.

Well, not necessarily not necessarily a good thing. See another rather  
sensible view point that I quite agree with having had some experience  
working with large, bureaucratic organizations http://shebanator.com/2009/11/02/open-government-and-pdf/


>
> When you annotate a PDF in Mendeley, can other users view your  
> annotations?

Sure thing -- with Mendeley Desktop. As far as I understand, for now  
there is no across the board standard way of annotating PDFs. Apple  
Preview's annotations are not visible in Skim.app, another Mac only  
PDF viewer and annotator (both are Cocoa products), and I am not sure  
if annotations from either of those are visible in Acrobat Reader or  
the other way around. Choose your poison. To the extent that folks are  
using Mendeley for biblio management, they will have Mendeley Desktop  
(made using Qt, hence cross-platform), hence, will be able to see the  
notes.


>
> Regards
> Graham
> _______________________________________________
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> okfn-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

-- 
Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org
Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org
Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu
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