hooking up citar and pdf-tools?

[bdarcus]

Adding this in case others are interested; an idea from a private email.

Is there some way to elegantly:

• search within some subset of (pdf) files (by, for example, author)
• browse through the results, perhaps narrow them, and then to open the selected result's pdf at its respective page number

It seems to me a solution that hooks up citar and pdf-tools would be the way to go, and specifically to exploit pdf-occur.

Edit: solution is currently on the wiki.

https://github.com/bdarcus/citar/wiki/Example-functions#search-contents-of-pdfs

[bdarcus]

@roshanshariff @localauthor - this is a pretty cool idea. Do either you work much with dired programmatically?

I think we just need a way to mark possible files to search based on the citar selections, and then run pdf-occur-dired-do-search.

PS - I added #477 for this, with the idea to put it on the wiki if we can figure out a simple and elegant solution.

[danielnemenyi]

I'm trying this out but I'm not seeing the relevant option to search pdfs listed after calling citar-act or citar-act-all. Any thoughts on what I might be missing?

[bdarcus]

You would have to add the command to your embark map for it to be recognized.

Does it work from M-x?

[danielnemenyi]

You would have to add the command to your embark map for it to be recognized.

Aha, makes sense

Does it work from M-x?

Ok, yes, it launches but errors on the function citar-file--files-for-multiple-entries, which seems to have been removed in ce51325?

[bdarcus]

Yeah, a lot has changed since I put that on the wiki.

My hunch is a revised example would be simpler.

If you manage to sort it out, can you please update the wiki?

Otherwise, I'll take a look when I get a chance.

[danielnemenyi]

Sure, I'll update the wiki if I work something out. Thanks

[bdarcus]

Take a look at citar-get-files.

It returns a hash-table of all files by key. You just need to filter for the PDFs, which I forget how to do ATM :-)

It might be you first just let-bind the list of all files for the selected citekeys, and then use seq-filter on that?

Something like this:

(defun ex/search-pdf-contents ()
  "Search pdfs."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((selected (citar-select-refs))
        (files (citar-get-files selected))
        (pdfs (seq-filter ...)) ;; filter the PDFs here
        (search-str (read-string "Search string: ")))
  (pdf-occur-search pdfs search-str t)))

@roshanshariff - is there a better way to get the list of PDFs for the selected references here?

I haven't been working with this codebase much for awhile, and most of my coding in that time has been in Rust!

[roshanshariff]

In general, yes, that is the way to go. If you're only looking at files that are stored in library directories (rather than coming from the file field inside the bibliography file, say) you can also do something like this:

(let ((citar-library-file-extensions '("pdf")))
  (citar-get-files key-or-keys))

This will filter the files as they're being searched for in the library directories, instead of finding them all and then keeping only the PDFs post-hoc.