So the first question,
have you tried ivy-bibtex or bibtex-completion earlier
and how it compares to eBib?
Well, I would say that I use both.
I don't think there is very much a comparison
because for me, they're achieving different goals.
When I want to just very quickly find the paper
in the entirety of the literature,
I can just go here and open ivy-bibtex and see it.
Bibtex now needs to parse my bib files,
so it may take a second.
Yeah, so if I want to just search, I'll do this.
If I want a bigger view, then I can open eBib,
but I don't use eBib so much as a tool
to find just one literature. I use it for other purposes.
So I think they're not really mutually exclusive,
like you can use both.
And they don't think that the features that one provides
are something that the other also provides.
They're different kind of goals for me.
Also, for the answers, is it OK
if I don't write anything down and I can just write them
After, when I have time, and I'll just talk.
Yeah, that's OK. We'll transcribe all the answers later.
So you can just go ahead and talk.
And do you find showing abstract
on your navigation panel helpful?
I always delete the abstract info,
and my bib files make things more concise.
So for me, I think it is helpful to see the abstract.
I think that if you're in a regular screen,
you have the space to have that.
And yeah, for example, if I go again here,
it's kind of indeed a bit more,
a bit longer than it can be.
And also you find a bigger abstract somewhere.
It may be more space,
but like, for example, this, yeah, this is a big abstract.
And for example, yeah, this takes a bit more space,
but I find it easy because the only case
where I'm actually looking at this panel
and trying to see things is when I'm going to be either,
is when I'm going to be trying to find something
that I don't remember the title to search immediately.
And if you don't remember the title
and you're trying to search,
the abstract will be a way
that helps you search better maybe.
and also the other thing they use
is also the small little descriptions
I add in the note entries to help me
but I think that the abstract is nice to be there
in case you don't remember
to find something from the title
or from your notes
and just need something more general.
So yes it can be large and not always convenient,
but I generally like it being there
in case I need it for anything. Then the next question.
Also, if any question is not fully answered by what I'm saying,
feel free to add more to your question
and we can discuss more. I don't have a problem.
So for the next one, yeah, I copied this from IRC
because I prefer to answer it orally
because it's a bit longer than the others answering in IRC.
So it seems that there's a meta problem here.
There's too much information.
And does this tool reduce the cognitive load?
Well, for me, it does reduce the cognitive load because
Indeed, there's a lot of information,
but that's how managing literature works, essentially.
It necessarily has to have a lot of cognitive load,
because you are trying to
process more information
than your brain can process to begin with.
So you really need a tool
to help you not keep everything in your mind,
process the information externally.
They do think that the way I do this, for me at least,
it does help with reducing cognitive load.
Because I'm here, for example,
if I'm looking for something, I do not remember,
I've read most of these papers not too many months ago,
so a lot of them are recent.
If I don't look at what I have written for it,
I do not remember anything.
So indeed, you have this kind of cognitive load
that I cannot remember everything.
But on the other hand, I think the tool helps
because my notes are what keeps, what I want to remember.
So it doesn't stay in my mind, it stays in the text.
And regarding things like the reading list,
I think also for me reduces the cognitive load
because I will mostly remember
what the papers I have in that list are,
but just sorting them by priority helps me
Okay, this was the thing I wanted to do next.
Oh, sorry. This is the thing I wanted to do next.
And I didn't have to remember
that this is what I want to do next.
I just had it, I saw it there.
So for me, it reduces cognitive load,
but the problem of too much information is 100% there
because there's objectively
too much information
when you're working with literature
that's by nature, and yeah, essentially
that's for me the thing
that I'm just putting this information elsewhere
so I don't have to keep it in my mind.
Okay, so when you download a new article,
how do you integrate the file to the database?
So, for example, do you remove
and rename the file manually?
So, for me, I also briefly showed that in the talk,
but I did that very quickly,
so it's understandable that it wasn't there.
Essentially, when I download the article,
then I will open ivy-bibtex and find the article.
For example, this one is the first.
You can open the menu in ivy-bibtex.
It's with an alt o, and then it will give you this menu.
And from here, it will say, add PDF to library.
And then it will ask from where do you want to add it?
I don't recommend the URL
because it doesn't download it properly sometimes.
As I also mentioned that with Zotra,
the URLs downloading things,
especially with academic papers
that are sometimes paywalled, it doesn't want to work well.
So I will download the paper
and then you can just press the f here for file.
And then you find the file.
For example, for me, all my PDFs are in this folder.
It's still named Zotero PDFs
from when it was Zotero saving them.
Now Zotero no longer saves them,
but I'm too bored to change the name.
And then you just find the paper you want.
So you can see there is an endless list of papers here,
and it then will automatically rename it
to have the title of the author, a small title and a date.
I believe the naming is also configurable,
but I have this notation in my config for many years now,
because that's how everything
expects to find it, essentially. I do not then move it.
It's stored in that folder.
I store all my PDFs in that specific folder.
And then Emacs knows that all PDFs
should be found in that folder.
And it then just looks for the name
that it expects to find.
And ivy-bibtex has renamed it automatically to that.
Okay, I'll wait a bit to continue with that
for moving to the next question.
Yeah, ivy-bibtex has that functionality.
And then annotations with e-readers.
Viewing and taking an Emacs or Reader touchscreen,
highlighting notes, noter, think would be an alternative,
e-book annotation alternative.
So, I do not use an e-reader, personally.
The only thing that I have is my tablet,
I can actually show you. It's this little thing here.
It's a Chromebook.
And the reason it's a Chromebook is that
when I bought it a few years ago,
it was the most viable alternative I could find
that can run Linux as a tablet with good touchscreen.
That was also a bit budget
because there are some Linux tablets,
but they were a bit too high cost
for what I was looking back then.
And this thing runs Linux essentially
natively from the Chromebook.
And I've installed Emacs there. It has all my config.
And so if I want to take touchscreen notes, I do it there.
But again, that is in Emacs. And it's mostly with PDFs.
I'm not sure if it answers exactly the question.
So if it's an e-reader, if it's, for example, a book,
I know that if you have an EPUB,
I think it's called the format for books,
and Org-noter can also read that.
So you could also open that file inside Emacs
using Org-noter and take notes.
But otherwise, If you're not
reading everything in Emacs,
then it's hard to pass annotations
from outside Emacs to inside it,
because of course you have less interoperability in that case.
but I think Emacs is featureful enough
to where you can do all your reading inside it.
And Org-noter has a surprising amount of different formats
where you can read things actually.
I hope it was clear if you want more on that
because I know it's a bit more a complex question, I guess,
also with e-readers.
And if it is in Emacs or not, feel free to add more.
And how well do you feel
about making notes on websites, PDF, videos?
So I will agree with the other question
that I answered here.
If you can convert something to PDF,
I prefer it because then
you need to only worry about PDFs
and it works better that way
than having to annotate websites.
There is, I believe, I should have it
in my bookmarks somewhere.
There is the org-roam protocol
that allows you to take notes directly out of a website
and it saves all the metadata of the website.
I did look at it at some point,
but I haven't really continued using it too much
because I find that I don't often take notes
from a website where I want more information
than just either the link of the website
or if I want the full text converting into a PDF.
So I haven't really found
a very big use case for it,
but I know that Org-Roam protocol is a thing.
And then for videos is a bit of a longer story
because if you want to take notes on videos,
that's a bit more complex.
And I don't know of a way to do it in Emacs,
but I also don't know of an effective way
to take notes on videos using other tools.
What I typically do if I'm following the video or something
is that I will take notes of the more important things.
I'll take notes of the more important things
that I was listening in the video.
And while I'm listening, I will take
some ideal crude notes,
not because I don't want to lose
a lot of my attention during
what I'm trying to learn by taking very good notes.
So most of the time,
those kinds of notes will be in paper,
even just very simple, crude notes.
And then without any timestamps or anything,
because that's too complex for what I've done.
And after watching, I will try to
consolidate all my thoughts that I wrote down
into some more permanent notes using Org Roam.
And then move on with that. Also look online,
if I noted that I want to look more on on this subject
that was mentioned the video
and I didn't fully understand it,
then I will try and look more, and things like that.
So for me, that's how I do it, because I think that
annotating a video directly with timestamps
and everything is a bit too complex.
I don't know if you have
any suggestions for working with that,
but for me, it has been very troublesome.
And then how do you add a new article from scratch,
a PDF that you did not have in your bib file?
How do you generate the bib entry metadata and abstract?
So yeah, the package is called Zotra.
I can also show it again. Let's find something.
and can open up. Let's not do that.
If I open it, I need to access it through my institution.
So I will not open the link, but I can show you essentially
you run zotra-add-entry, this function,
and it copies what you have currently in,
what you have already copied right now,
it's the message I copied before for the Q&A,
but if you open a paper and have the URL copied,
it will immediately come here and will save everything.
Also as I mentioned there's the...
you can also download attachments from there,
but with paywalled articles doesn't always work well,
so I just do it manually
Oh, system is running low on power. Give me just a second.
So the computer doesn't turn off as we're speaking. Yes.
So yeah, everything is added from scratch.
Essentially you copy the URL and give it to Zotra,
and it does everything.
When you fact check every detail
for a bib entry, your author names, published journal,
doi stuff. So I generally don't do that.
Oh yeah, thanks for the person
that added the link to the Zotra.
I wouldn't say that I fact check the details.
I assume that when they're added,
they're actually correct.
Have you actually had trouble with a tool
that automatically adds them, to add them wrong?
I'm curious. I haven't really heard
that happening too much.
I've always thought that, yeah, if you do it manually,
you need to fact check that you did it correctly.
But I always assume that if you do it
automatically through a tool,
It should already be correct.
And I don't remember ever having any trouble either
when I was using Zotero before, or now
with the more Emacs based tools.
I feel like the big entries are copied correctly.
I haven't noticed this being incorrect.
But I'm curious, do you have any point
on that, I will keep in mind.
Sometimes, DOI records are not exactly correct.
For example, they can contain some very strange symbols.
So that can happen sometimes. OK. Yeah. I don't know.
I guess then if you want to fact check,
it's probably the best to do it directly as it is added,
like it's added, for example, here,
and you can just directly, when you add it,
find it and say, is everything correct here?
Because I think that if you leave it for later,
it will be much more of a mess.
So for checking, I would just do it directly
after I add it to the bib file.
And let me see, is there anything else?
I think one common way it can fail
is when the metadata includes
HTML tags for math, for example.
And in some papers, for some journals, it can happen.
So then you can imagine what happens
when you try to put that citation
into your references.
That's going to be a mess.
Yeah, okay. I didn't know, to be honest, so yeah.
Thanks for the information.
I think our graph has automatic cleaning
of certain things
for common errors in the metadata.
How did you call that?
I can note it down also here for the discussion.
Oh, our graph. Or graph. Or graph. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. I will put it down the pad.
And I think the next talk,
the live will move in the next minute anyways.
And I see we're done with all the questions.
So thank you everyone. I hope this was interesting.
Thank you for giving me a lot of questions
so we had to discuss for the whole time
and we weren't just here sitting.
And enjoy the rest of EmacsConf.