dfay

This is doable with script hooks in BibDesk. https://github.com/derickfay/BibDesk-MavericksTags/issues/1

Save as PDF for research material, Pinboard (with the paid account which archives your bookmarked sites to PDF) for most everything else.

Sure. I've demo'ed Devonthink seriously three times in the past 12 years or so, and have never liked it. The AI seems ok for filing invoices and that kind of largely standardised document but I never found it to work with academic lit. -- it would do things like try to file all my JSTOR downloads together because the cover pages were similar. It predates native tagging and Spotlight (pre-Tiger was it? can't remember) so it probably solved some problems way back but it has never impressed me. UI and menu systems desperately need a cleanup and reorganisation but the developers really don't seem to care (e.g. not fixing Zoom eight years after the original request: https://forum.devontechnologies.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8131 ). I was quite put off by some of their responses on the DT forums. Likewise DevonAgent seems like a tool that has outlived its usefulness - see https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/the-other-devons-agent-sphere/4913 . The other downside is that DT is really not oriented to creating custom metadata in a very usable way, as far as I can tell. The only reason I could see using it now is to take advantage of document linking that works on MacOS and iOS, but sync doesn't sound that reliable. Long discussion pro and con here: https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/good-arguments-to-buy-devonthink-pro/3554/67 The core of my academic paper workflow is BibDesk as described above. The underlying BibTeX format and existing tools are definitely not focused on legal citation. But you can use your .bib file with citeproc & CSL which has been pretty aggressively pushed toward accommodating legal citation (not least by Frank Bennett of Nagoya U). Having said that, I have big piles of PDFs that aren't in BibDesk yet -- stuck in various folders which serve as project inboxes, waiting for me to review and organise them. For this stuff, HoudahSpot has been the most valuable addition to my toolkit in the last few years -- it can do everything I might have got from DT while relying on the native file system and tagging. Especially with its Search Bar and some custom templates to limit the search scope. I tend not to use hierarchical tags at the file system level - have never really felt the need. For detailed paragraph-level coding, I do (using MaxQDA) but that's very project-specific. I also rarely if ever use aliases -- BibDesk lets me stick publication records in multiple folders in the app, so I just have a folder or two per project and I can dump the record in every one where it belongs without worrying about the linked files themselves. Besides tagging linked files with BibDesk keywords, my main use of tags is actually for more short-term purposes. Sometimes I'll add tags to files in a project inbox folder as a form of preliminary triage. Or I'll use tags to track status of things - so I have ridiculously long tags like checkedFor2017MedicalExpenses, checkedAgainstZCFolders, Gone0915 (for households that were no longer part of a panel sample in 2009 or 2015). That kind of thing. Combine these with HoudahSpot and Arrange By... and Smart Folders in the Finder and that provides pretty robust file management, for my purposes anyway. Some of this tagging is combined with filing (e.g. ). What else? It's all a work in progress, perpetually. On FileMaker this recent thread may be helpful: https://community.filemaker.com/message/805921

Nice. I did something similar with a script filter a few years back:

Re: tag - I use it almost exclusively through scripts run from Alfred or Hazel. There are examples using bash and calling it from python in this thread:

Very briefly (will reply re DevonThink and workflow later....) the file action you describe its totally feasible in Alfred...

Not exactly the same but this thread may be helpful

You do realize amex lets you download a csv right? see https://www.americanexpress.com/us/customer-service/faq.download-export-transactions-software.html (not that it’s not worth solving the underlying problem, just saying....)

Are you on Mojave?

Actually there is one piece of metadata that I do keep in sync with BibDesk. I have AppleScripts to copy BibDesk keywords to linked files as Tags and to Ulysses sheets as keywords. I rarely search for academic PDFs by Tag but I do use keyword searching on my reading notes in Ulysses quite a bit. For the file tagging I use https://github.com/jdberry/tag . For Ulysses I use the Ulysses URL scheme. Actually I just looked at my code, and it turns out I don't use the tag command line tool ... but I would if I were to do it again. Here's the script I use, which gives an idea of how to use AppleScript and xattr to write file metadata. It's ugly and awkward but it works so I can't be bothered to clean it up set plistFront to "<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC \"-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN\" \"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd\"><plist version=\"1.0\"><array>" set plistEnd to "</array></plist>" (* By Derick Fay, 2013-10-28 *) (* Thanks to http://mosx.tumblr.com/post/54049528297/convert-openmeta-to-os-x-mavericks-tags-with-this for getting me started *) tell application "BibDesk" -- without document, there is no selection, so nothing to do if (count of documents) = 0 then beep display dialog "No documents found." buttons {"•"} default button 1 giving up after 3 end if set thePublications to the selection of document 1 -- get the keywords repeat with thePub in thePublications set currentKeywords to get keywords of thePub -- convert the keywords to a plist for use with xattr set {myTID, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, {", "}} set tagList to text items of currentKeywords set AppleScript's text item delimiters to myTID set plistTagString to "" repeat with theTag in tagList set plistTagString to plistTagString & "<string>" & theTag & "</string>" end repeat set plistTagString to plistFront & plistTagString & plistEnd -- add the tags set theFiles to POSIX path of linked files of thePub repeat with f in theFiles do shell script "xattr -w com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags '" & plistTagString & "' " & quoted form of f end repeat end repeat end tell

I don't. In fact I prefer to leave it alone since it often has things like the "Where From:" field that I'd like to keep unchanged. I use BibDesk to manage my academic PDFs (but any reference manager will work the same way). The BibDesk record is where the author, date etc. goes, and this can typically be downloaded from the publisher and/or Google Scholar (most often for me this means using Andrew Ning's reference importer workflow . I then add the PDF to the BibDesk record, and it's set to autofile and rename based on the info. in the BIbDesk record (I use Author Date Title existing filename as my autofile template). The BibDesk record for me is the canonical version of the pub -- I might have multiple versions of the PDF, various sets of reading notes, links to related pubs, etc., attached to the BibDesk record, but I don't worry about the details of the files. I can't remember the last time I looked up an article by browsing in the PDF directory, actually -- I always begin with a search in BibDesk. I don't see the payoff of editing PDF metadata directly, basically because I don't have a use for it. Searching BibDesk (via Alfred usually) lets me find the files, as well as create linked annotations etc., and generate citations and bibliographic refs. for the articles. To me it makes much more sense to create a record in BibDesk (or again whatever reference manager you're using) and let it manage the filing for you. Having said that, if I wanted to copy reference info. from BibDesk into the metadata of linked PDFs, I would definitely use ExifTool . (I use this with Hazel to automatically set a bunch of metadata for my photos). Incidentally I use the same approach for primary sources but with a custom FileMaker database -- I was working on a couple databases earlier tonight to manage court cases (mostly saved as PDF but again I'm not going to save the details in the metadata of the file itself) and archival records. Each entry has a link to the PDF of the court judgments, and I can add other docs. (Heads of Argument, annotations, my own notes, citing cases, etc).

+1

It’s working fine for me - can’t remember how I fixed it because it’s been a while.... I’d say make sure you have the latest version from the github repo than check if your issue is covered in the tracker: https://github.com/andrewning/alfred-workflows-scientific/issues If worst comes to worst I can send you a copy of my working version.

And there’s been one here for the last three years that still works fine.

For workflow objects which have a Title property it would be quite convenient to have the Note which displays under the object automatically set to the title, or at least have an option to do so. Even better would be if this could be retroactively applied to existing workflows.

See https://github.com/derickfay/import-alfred-snippets The script there requires some manual intervention but it should be easy to automate further if you need to,

For OmniFocus 3: day: tell application "OmniFocus" set value of preference id "OFIColorPaletteIdentifier" to "default" end tell night: tell application "OmniFocus" set value of preference id "OFIColorPaletteIdentifier" to "builtin:20-Dark" end tell

see https://talk.automators.fm/t/mojave-automation-apocalypse/1673 Sounds like there has been some progress since but overall it seems like sandboxing etc. are much more aggressive and intrusive.

But...the original relies on a command line call that may generate an error (it does in High Sierra): set guiMode to do shell script "defaults read -g AppleInterfaceStyle" This is in a try command - if it works, the script knows the system is in dark mode -- if it throws an error, the script knows it's in light mode -- not the most graceful way to do it ...but I didn't write it and it's worked from Yosemite through High Sierra so far. It may be the case that Mojave is setting a value for that default (and hence not giving an error) whether in light or dark mode in which case the approach would be to branch based on the value of guiMode.

This works for me with one change -- you have an extra end tell in the 2nd to last line -- if your tell command is all on one line as in the line tell application "Alfred 3" to set theme "Alfred macOS Dark" you don't use a separate end tell. But it turns off dark mode while setting Alfred to a dark theme so you may want to reconsider aesthetically You can use your script in its own workflow or edit the existing script in the workflow above to match -- I've modified my copy so much I don't remember exactly what the original script was.

see You’ll need to update refs. in the Applescript from “Alfred 2“ to “Alfred 3”.

?

Not until OF3 ships. I poked around in the SQL and the tag data isn’t being synced to OF2 even though it’s obviously there in the cloud. Until we can read the SQL there’s no way to tell what to look for.

Well it can be done with Fake’s Applescript but it’s bc it’s doing the injection under the hood...but I agree that API is probably best.