Academic tool suggestions

[dalai]

References are quite important but it would probably be easier to handle them before uploading the document to the device. Journal databases are already capable of exporting citation information and if the software used to upload your documents supports it, it could keep a database of all the documents on the device (including citation information and possibly other stuff like where was it downloaded from, to which project is it related to, other notes etc.)

It is also my experience that complete citation info is not always available in the pdf anyway (metadata or no) and personally I prefer to store that info when I download a paper (even if I won't need it) rather than trying to find it later.

Nevertheless the capability of properly handling citations is useful only if you are going to prepare documents on that platform and to be honest I never felt like doing that on the go. Personally I prefer my PC for that since it's easier to type in a normal keyboard and I have access to other useful software for creating graphs and images as well as for data analysis.

[nekokami]

Point is, you want to be able to mark interesting passages while you're reading and collect the references later, as you need them. Whether you prepare the reference metadata off-device when you download the item (if that's how you get it) or on doesn't matter so much as the fact that at some point you're going to want to be able to select from among your various notes and generate a reference list. That's the part I'd like to have the system take care of for me. Yes, I'll probably actually write the research document on my laptop. But as I'm doing so, I want the device next to me so I can flip around through different reference sections I've marked, select the items for export, and then get them in some kind of usable list at the end. Does that make sense? (Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way, after all....)

[icecubex]

As a mathematician:

As I've said elsewhere, I personally don't feel I need a4 (I asked about the ease of recompiling arxiv tex files to work in a3 elsewhere, but nobody knew - I'm guessing splitting would be far safer - do most ebooks currently support this by default?); I wouldn't mind viewing half pages landscape - I personally prefer portability. Also don't really need colour.

Annotations would be nice.

I REALLY don't need an mp3 player.

Being able to make scribbles might be nice, but it's not a big deal for me.

High storage capacity would be nice.

However, as someone who plays the piano:

A4 would friggin ROCK. Being able to scribble would ROCK.

Rock, I tells ya.

I still REALLY don't need an mp3 player.

Ideally I'd get both if they were available : )

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Does that make sense? (Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way, after all....)

Makes perfect sense, neko, to me at least. Of course I have the advantage of watching my wife work her way through her dissertation, and considering what sorts of functions she'd need to 'electronicate' the reading/note taking process she uses.

Originally Posted by icecubex

High storage capacity would be nice.

As long as there's some sort of memory card slot, your storage is effectively limited only by how many cards you want to mess with. Speaking for myself, I want enough on-board storage for my readings, but for anything heavier-duty (such as y'all are talking about) I'd think that a reasonably well executed memory card approach might actually be better -- I find it a lot easier/quicker to pull a card and put it in the PC to do serious work with its contents there, than yanking stuff back and forth to on-board memory. Of course, that would require that the contents/annotations/etc. generated by the 'InfoPad' be readable on the PC.

[erwin]

Hi nekokami!

I advise you to consider a Compaq/HP Tc1000 or TC1100 TabletPc.

You can find a review of the TC1100 here:
http://www.tabletpc2.com/Review-HPTC1100.htm

and of the TC1000 here: http://reviews.cnet.com/HP_Compaq_Ta...-20627295.html

You should be able to fetch the TC1100 on ebay for around 800 US$ and the TC1000 for around 4-500 US$.

I used to own a TC1000, and found it reliable. The only real problem was the affidability of the stylus connection. And the fact that it uses windoze of course...

[dalai]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Does that make sense?

Sorry I probably misunderstood what you meant earlier. Of course it makes sense and what bugs me is that some of the current devices almost have the hardware capabilities we want them to (at least the stuff that we can't do without). The problem is that their software doesn't support it and it seems that noone cares to implement the necessary functionality. Of course their price doesn't help either.

Originally Posted by icecubex

I still REALLY don't need an mp3 player

For me that shows to whom these devices are targeted. Especially for eInk this is the first generation of devices and maybe they want to play it safe, aiming for the widest possible audience.

Originally Posted by icecubex

recompiling arxiv tex files

Well I don't know the format of the arxiv tex files but if you have the source you can either change the document size to a5paper in the document class declaration or if the template doesn't support it use something like this:

\usepackage[a5paper,hmargin=0.2cm,vmargin=0.2cm]{geometry}

Afterwards you might need to crop your pdf. I found some instructions in this post but I've never tried to do that.

[nekokami]

So, now that I have my very own iLiad, I'm finding that I still want this annotation/bibliography tool. I'm willing to pay for it, too, but I probably can't afford to fund the whole development effort. Is there anyone out there who wants to work on this, open-source, if enough of us chip in something for the development?

[jackbrown]

Yeah, I'm with Emkay. I'm doing a social sciences masters. I read half a dozen papers a day from JSTOR and the like (A4 Pdf). No time to manually reformat. Once resizing and zooming became available, the Iliad suddenly became totally usable.; replaced course readers and printouts. Writing notes in the margins of the PDFs is a nice bonus too; I don't care that they aren't autorecognized, since that just added the functionality of paper printouts to the Iliad anyway. I wish the device was a LITTLE bigger, but its nice to be able to throw it into a bag without it taking up space. I guess A5 size overall would still be workable, but not an A5 screen with more crap around it.

It still isn't nearly as comfortable to use the Iliad as a single paper printout or a book, mainly because of the godawful contrast ratio (my biggest disappointment when I first flipped it on), and the slow page-flips. It's NOT like using a book since you can't rapidly find a random page by flipping through it...If white was really white, and if every screen refresh was more or less instant, ie you could run the pen along the little bar at the bottom and it would shuffle pages in real time, this thing would be as good as a book. Color is, I think, almost completely irrelevant for a reader--just give me a really white background!

[nekokami]

The semester just started here and I'm in a class where we'll be reading a lot of journal articles (quantitative research design in education, doctoral level). Does anyone have software to recommend that might be ported to the iLiad, for tracking notes made on documents? They're in PDF, but I could probably fix that (though my OCR sw might balk a bit at some of the non-Latin statistical symbols).

[dalai]

Jarnal is in Java and supports annotating pdfs. I don't know what it'd take to run it in iLiad.

From the webpage:

Requirements: Java 2 1.4.2 or later. Jarnal runs both as an application and as an applet.

[nekokami]

The iLiad already allows notes to be taken on PDF. What I'm looking for is something that can TRACK the notes on the PDF, e.g. a bibliography tool. See #17, above.

[dalai]

I know of only two apps with functionality close to what you need, but I doubt they can be ported to iLiad. One is Mac only (Papers) and the other one is a Firefox extension (Zotero). The latter doesn't support notes on the PDF but only on the reference. I haven't found any other app that supports PDF annotation and organizing your notes at the same time.

[nekokami]

Papers looks interesting, but doesn't seem to quite do what I need. As a way to organize PDFs, it looks good, but as a way to organize my notes in PDFs, I'm not seeing what I need.

Zotero looks more interesting. I don't care if the notes are stored in the PDF itself, but it looks like Zotero isn't yet able to look within a PDF and take bibliographical information or selected text from there. I guess I'd have to convert my existing PDF files to some other format, which would be somewhat of a nuisance.

What I need is something that replaces the "index card" method of reading, where you create a database of quotes or references, including citation, while reading, then organize those and use them to write afterward. For example, I'll need to write at least one literature review in the next couple of months. As I read through multiple documents, I need to be able to note interesting areas in each and categorize them. Then I need to be able to pull up that list of notes.

It looks to me like Zotero can do some of this this, but the lack of PDF support may be a critical failure. I was also hoping to be able to do it on the iLiad, but the full version of Firefox doesn't run there.

[LaughingVulcan]

I know that you've long since chosen, but owning a Fujitsu Stylistic in the 4900 series, I wish I'dve had that with Microsoft OneNote or Franklin software in school.

Doubly so with the print function in OneNote 2007. Go to the PDF page you want to cite, print the page to a page in your OneNote section. (First print the title and bibliography data, or just sketch it in freehand with the stylus.) For non-printable books, I'm pretty sure you can do a screencap, crop it with whatever tool you'd like, then C/P it into OneNote (I can't remember for sure, but I think that OneNote could do the crop of your screencap if you wanted.)

Anyway, that's what I would use today if I were still in school. Sadly, I didn't get my Tablet until I was seven-plus years out of postgrad.

[nekokami]

Hm. I suppose I could use FBshot to do this on the iLiad. I'd rather be able to select the actual text, though.