Month: December 2015

Fedora 23 on a Dell XPS13 (part 1)

Taking advantage of a trip to Canada and a very favourable CAN$:€ exchange rate, I bought a Dell XPS13 (9350 or “late 2015”), following excellent reviews from around the web. Dell sold a ‘developer edition‘ of this laptop (shipping with Ubuntu Linux) but unfortunately it was out of stock on Dell US and I couldn’t find the item on the Dell Canada website. So I bought the Windows version with a touchscreen (it was Black Friday :-)).

fedora_infinity_140x140Here is how to install Fedora 23 on it (and probably most other Linux distribution) … I will focus on three aspects (in brief: everything works out of the box, except the wireless card that needed some additional action):

  1. How to boot and install Fedora Workstation
  2. What works and what doesn’t work out of the box
  3. Some things to do after installation (additional software)

Continue reading “Fedora 23 on a Dell XPS13 (part 1)” →

Import PDFs and related metadata in Zotero

I discover new things everyday …

I wrote earlier that I really liked Zotero, a reference management software. However, there is one thing that was missing, imho: the capability to import PDFs (individually or in bulk) and correctly fill in the various fields of the reference.

But in fact, this already exists in Zotero! Just drag a PDF in the middle section (the reference list) then right-click on it and choose “Retrieve Metadata from PDF” (*). Retrieval of the title, the authors, the journal, etc. everything goes very fast and they are stored as a normal reference, now on the right.

151203-Zotero-PDFtools-importMetadata

151203-Zotero-PDFtools-jobdone

Now, it works for most papers I tested yesterday and today. Most major editors are supported (it seems Zotero doesn’t actually extract metadata from the PDF but finds these metadata by comparing the PDF content with Google Scholar). As hinted in the Zotero support page for this function, please re-check the imported reference in case something went wrong (I imported something like 20 references since yesterday with this function and I didn’t spot any error for the moment).

Bulk import and metadata retrieval works too: just import several PDFs at the same time and, while all of them are selected in Zotero, right-click on them and choose “Retrieve Metadata for PDF”.

As mentioned earlier, “it’s just plain efficiency, without bells and whistles“. It just works 🙂

(*) On MS-Windows, on the first use, you might see a dialog box warning you that you must first install the “PDF tools”.

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If you see it, just choose the “Open preferences” button and follow the very intuitive procedure. The installation takes 30 seconds maximum, download included.