Papiers is a tool to index your pdf files/research papers/… and quickly search through them.

• Install the dependencies (opam install batteries yojson ANSITerminal uri camlzip cmdliner cpdf lambda-term if you have opam)
• Edit the src/config.ml if you want to change the default reader for the sources (default: xdg-open), or the colors.
• Then:

./configure  
make && sudo make install

You can build the html documentation for the papierslib library by running:

make doc

After that the generated documentation will be in the papierslib_api.docdir directory.

Papiers now works a bit like git: you have papiers repositories; a repository is located in a directory, and index sources that are contained in this directory.

• Initialize a new repository in the current directory: papiers init
• Add documents to the database: papiers doc add interesting_paper.pdf
• Make queries to the database: papiers search keyword1 keyword2
• Type papiers --help to see the other possibilities

A query is more or less simply a list of keywords, that are searched through the documents informations, like the title, authors, sources and tags.

You may want to refine this keyword based search. It is possible in some way by using prefixes:

• If you prepend a keyword with tag: or ta:, it will only match tags.
• Prepend with title: or ti:, it'll search only in titles.
• With a:, au: or author:, only in authors.
• With s:, src: or source:, only in sources.
• With la: or lang:, only for languages.