Application: DocEar
Category: Office
Description: From the publisher's website:
Docear (“dog-ear”) is an academic literature suite. It integrates everything you need to search, organize and create academic literature into a single application: digital library with support for pdf documents, reference manager, note taking and with mind maps taking a central role. What’s more, Docear works seamlessly with many existing tools like Mendeley, Microsoft Word, and Foxit Reader. Docear is free and open source, based on Freeplane, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Technology and developed by scientists from around the world, among others from OvGU, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Note: This program relies on a local Java installation or jPortable.
Download DocEar Portable 1.2.0.0 build 291 Dev Test 1 (61.6MB download / 73.7MB installed)
(MD5: f2e95729105ba2de00a5b4c344f43244)
Note: As mentioned in a post below, DocEar is in the process of adding more advanced PDF capabilities. As such, I would like any end users who like experimenting to try and see ways of integrating the portable PDF readers already here (such as Foxit and Sumatra). This, along with experimenting with external JabRef and Freeplane, would help tremendously.
Release Notes:
See all release notes at the SourceForge project page.
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Once the app was installed in my USB, the first time I ran it, I was asked to select a PDF reader. Although I have Sumatra Portable in the unit, and up to four PDF application in the CPU, DocEar only detected local Acrobat and Adobe Reader. Wouldn't it be nice that it detected the portable Sumatra , and offered them as default PDF readers for DocEar ?
The default-settings procedure mentions and "highly recommends" PDF-XChange Viewer , but it is a licensed closed source software. Which of the three portableapps' readers (Sumatra, Evince or Foxit ), if any, would allow highlighting text in it and import it into DocEar (as PDF-XChange Viewer does)? Any ideas?
Regards,
Eolo
The app only works with specific PDF readers. For others, you'll need to ask the publisher of the base app.
Also, a note, you don't need all the formatting in your posts. It makes it harder to read.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Update:
If DocEar will not depend on software already installed in each used computer, it should be able to be configured to use a portable PDF reader installed in the same memory stick. This means selecting Sumatra, Evince or FoxIt. Of these, only FoxIt is reviewed in DocEars' User Manual.
http://www.docear.org/support/user-manual/#compatible_pdf_readers
On the other hand, the recommended PDF reader, PDFX-Change Viewer (PDFXCV), though commercial, has a free, unlimited and portable version, that a can be set as the default reader for Docear. You only need to:
1) Unzip PDFXCV in a folder in your memory stick, say PortableApps/PDFX-ChangeViewerPortable.
2) Upon Docear's initial setup process, accept Adobe Reader from the "installed compatible options". (They are fixed, and not gotten freom a Registry scan.)
3) In PDFXCV go to Preferences / General / Saving Documents, and change it to Always Incremental Save.
4) In Docear go to Preferences / PDF Management / Open Annotations, and choose Use compatible PDF viewer. Press to "manually define the pdf reader command (with caution!!!)", and write:
..\PDFX-ChangeViewerPortable\PDFXCview.exe*/A*page=$PAGE*"$FILE"5) Restart Docear.
That's all to it.
Eolo
I wonder if I can make it into a plugin for DocEar... either that or I can try and work out the commandline options.
DocEar depends on other programs to work, specifically: Freeplane, jPortable, JabRef and a PDF reader (preferably PDF-XChange Viewer Free or Foxit Reader).
My question is: Which of these must be installed in the memory stick before I install DocEar, which will bew installed automatically along with DocEar and which it is redundant to have aside DocEar?
My suggestion is to clearly announce the answer to this question in DocEar's download page in PortableApps and provide links to all necessary and optional dependencies. It is also my suggestion to simple copy the instructions I provided above on how to install PDF-XChange Viewer and make it interact with DocEar.
I think that's all that is needed to publish DocEar Portable.
Eolo
DocEar already contains both Freeplane and JabRef within the package and I am currently unable to make it interact with the portable versions of either. I did already include a link to jPortable (which is the only actual dependency for running it).
As for the PDF reader, that's your personal choice as to what to install on your USB stick, especially since I have found no easy (or any) way to get a list of portable readers to use. Unfortunately the way the program works currently, it scans the local system on first run, but can be changed in the menus later. So, in short, I can't give instructions because there are none that would work properly.
Updated to 1.0.0.15 (RC4) build 213 Dev Test 1. See release notes for details.
Updated to 1.0.0.15 build 214 Dev Test 1. See release notes for details.
Updated to 1.0.2.2 build 219 Dev Test 1. See release notes for details.
From DocEars Feb. 21st. newsletter:
"... a lot has happened:
1. Call for Donation to improve Docear's PDF metadata extraction
2. Docear 1.03 released
3. Docear4Word 1.23 released
Call for Donation to improve Docear's PDF metadata extraction
---------------------------------------------------------
One of Docear’s biggest disadvantages, compared to other reference managers, is the rather poor PDF metadata extraction capability. As such, it is no surprise that the second most popular feature request is to add decent PDF metadata extraction and file renaming to Docear. However, adding such a function is a lot of work and we currently do not really have the manpower for this. Fortunately, one of our best students – i.e. Christoph, who already did a lot of work for us – wants a paid job for his semester breaks."
This means that DocEar Portable can now be updated. But most importantly, that PDF handling in DocEar could change a lot in the next months. Maybe the problems pof the PortrableApps version, which are all related to PDF readers' start, could now change.
Regards.
Eolo
My school internet is lacking in many ways, so when I can get the new version uploaded, I will.
Updated to 1.0.3.1 build 221 Dev Test 1. See release notes and note in the main post for details.
From the developers site:
> Docear 1.1 stable released with strongly improved PDF metadata extraction.
> Finally, after releasing the alpha and beta, today we release Docear 1.1 stable.
> Thanks to all the generous donors, our student Christoph could work on an improved PDF metadata retrieval for Docear. The new Docear 1.1 is able to extract the title of a PDF and fetch metadata from Google Scholar for that title.
> Apart from the metadata retrieval we have improved how Docear handles BibTeX files from Mendeley and Zotero. Both use other BibTeX dialects than JabRef (our integrated reference manager).
> The functionality is directly integrated into Docear’s desktop software. This means, you do not depend any more on Docear’s Web Services, which, admittedly, was not always the most reliable service. In addition, the entire source code is open-source, and other projects are welcome to use it for their own purposes. If Docear’s licence (GPL) is not suitable for your project, let us know. We have no problem to additionally release the code under another open source licence such as Apache or whatsoever.
http://www.docear.org/2014/05/21/docear-1-1-stable-released-with-strongl...
Eolo
I'm getting close to the point where I can pick up packaging my apps again consistently, so thanks for the update. Look for this (and pretty much everything else I need to update) appear in the next couple of weeks.
Updated to 1.1.0.1 build 232 Dev Test 1. See release notes for details.
Tried using portable Docear and the CMD window is showing, while the installed version does not show any CMD window. can this be removed? Thx!
I don't see a need to do that right now, but in the mean time, you can edit your launcher.ini file (App\AppInfo\Launcher\DocEarPortable.ini) and add the "HideCommandLineWindow" parameter as seen here.
Thx dude! It work now!
Updated to 1.2.0.0 build 291 Dev Test 1. See release notes for details.