E-Learning

PDF X-Change Viewer The free PDF X-Change Viewer (PDFXV) has the potential to be the best PDF Reader for Docear since Docear can import bookmarks, comments and highlighted text from PDFs edited with PDFXV. However, you need to change one setting and this is really important: Open the Preferences (Edit -> Preferences…), open the ‘General’ tab, select ‘Always incremental save’ in the section ‘saving documents’ for the ‘Set Document Save Method’. If you do not change the setting, PDFXV is altering the IDs of you annotations (and mess up your entire PDF) and Docear will import your annotations multiple times. However, be aware that this is just a work-around. It still could happen that PDFXV is changing objectIDs of your annotations and annotations are imported twice. If you should realize such a behavior please let us know and use another PDF reader. Also, you can help us convincing the PDFXV developers to implement a permanent solution: Please visit their forum and support our request to not change object numbers once they were created (just register in the forum and post something like “me too”). In addition, if you want Docear to be able to import highlighted text, please ensure to have the following two settings enabled.

Mendeley Using Mendeley and Docear in conjunction is simple. You only have to ensure to use the same reference data and the same PDF files in both, Mendeley and Docear. Using the same reference data Mendeley has a feature to create and update a BibTeX file that can be used with Docear. To activate this function in Mendeley, select “Tools -> Options -> BibTeX” and ensure all settings are as in the screenshot. The Path is not fundamentally important but ideally it should be within the workspace of Docear. Please use folders instead of groups to organize your pdfs in Mendeley. Groups will lead to duplicates in your BibTeX file.

To activate the function in Docear just do a right click on your reference file in the workspace window and select “Change Location …“, then select your Mendeley BibTeX file (it is called library.bib and it is located in the Path specified above) Important: Do any changes on your reference data directly in Mendeley. Do not change reference data in Docear because all changes made in Docear will be overwritten by Mendeley. If you like, visit the Mendeley support forum and vote on the idea that Mendeley synchronizes BibTeX data in both  directions. Using the same PDF files We highly recommend deactivating the functions “Sort files into subfolders” and “rename document files” because otherwise problems might occur in Docear when files are automatically renamed by Mendeley.

If you have activated the function “Organize my files” in Mendeley (and we recommend using this function), it is important to specify the same directory you have specified in Mendeley as your literature repository in Docear. To do so, do a right click on “literature repository” in the workspace window and select “Change location …“. Select the same directory you have specified in Mendeley. If you do not have activated the function ”Organize my files” in Mendeley, you need to use the folder you are watching in Mendeley as literature repository in Docear. You find this folder in Mendeley in the Options in the tab “Watched Folders”.

Please note: If you are using Mendeley and Docear in conjunction, you should use Mendeley for reference management but not for making annotations in PDF files. Annotations made in Mendeley cannot be read by Docear (and other standard compliant PDF readers). Click here for more information. Known issues Some Mendeley users reported that Docear tells them their Mendeley BibTeX file would contain duplicate BibTeX keys. This is a very annoying error but we can’t do anything about it. Please ask the Mendeley team to implement a proper BibTeX export that is not producing duplicate keys. Vote for this idea and this idea. Also, Mendeley does not include entries set to “Details need review”. Please vote here  to have Mendeley include all entries in their BibTeX export.