Paperboy - a utility to rename a messy collection of pdfs

PAPERBOY

Paperboy is a small .pdf management utility.

It is borne out of the frustration of having a dowload folder full of PDFs with names like 'I08.pdf', '1412.4880.pdf' and so on. Since I want to save some of these files for later reading, it would be helpful to have more descriptive filenames.

This tool helps with renaming those files. It will rename/move documents to a specified folder, and it even gives some filename suggestions by looking at the file content and the pdf metadata.

Paperboy aims to keep its file management dumb (no keeping files in a database or hidden library folder), so you can uninstall it at any time and your files will remain perfectly accessible.

Usage

• Open a new file import dialog with Space or Enter .
• Switch between the library and the inbox with Tab .
• Open a file from the library with Enter or Space .
• Quit the application with Esc or Ctrl + c .

Install

Homebrew on macOS

If you're a Homebrew user, you can install the latest version and its dependencies from the repo's tap:

$ brew install 2mol/tools/pboy

Get the binary release

Download the archive for your operating system from https://github.com/2mol/pboy/releases . Extract and install it with

$ tar zxvf pboy*.tar.gz
$ mv pboy ~/.local/bin/

For the latter to work, ~/.local/bin/ needs to exist and be in your PATH . Alternatively, put it in /usr/local/bin .

Stack

Make sure you have poppler installed, which will provide both pdftotext and pdfinfo . On Linux, install poppler with your package manager of choice. If you are on Mac and using Homebrew you can do brew install poppler .

Assuming you have stack, the following will compile, then install the pboy executable in your .local/bin :

$ git clone [email protected]:2mol/pboy.git
$ cd pboy
$ stack install

Nix

If you have Nix, then you're a smartypants who already knows what to do:

$ git clone [email protected]:2mol/pboy.git
$ cd pboy
$ nix-build

Config

Paperboy creates a .pboy.toml in your home directory. Use this to change your library and incoming folders, as well as to specify whether you want to move the imported files or just copy them.

Current Limitations

For large files, pdftotext can take quite a long time to parse the document, which is stupid because we're only using the first couple of lines for file name suggestions.

Contribute

Feel free to open issues, fix the Readme or send pull requests against the spec file https://github.com/2mol/pboy/blob/master/Spec.md . You're generally very welcome to share any opinions, documentation improvements, fixes, refactoring suggestions etc.

See the abovementioned document to get an idea of what some of the next priotities are, especially the section Next actionable .

Thanks

brick is lovely .

The name for this tool is inspired by this atrocity , which I had for the NES and never quite mastered.