From its early beginnings as a tool for proofing documents destined for print, Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) has become a tremendously popular means of distributing documents over the Internet. Mac, Windows, and Linux users can share fully-formatted documents using PDF. Mac OS X even includes the ability to save any document as a PDF. Yep is a clever application that gives you the power to manage all of the PDFs you download, receive as email attachments, or create yourself.
MLS reader Drew Schinzel told me about Yep back in early November, and I’m thankful for the recommendation. The timing was perfect. I was pulling together sources for a paper, and I didn’t have a clean, easily-managed method of collecting and managing them. I realized that I could use Yep to save web pages, Lexis-Nexis/Westlaw research, abstracts, government reports, and other materials. “Save to Yep” is the killer feature that makes all this possible. For example, when I find an article online that looks like it will be a good source, I just save to Yep. The article is saved as a PDF and dropped into Yep. I can add the article’s URL into the info box when I save to Yep. This way, if I need to I can go back to the original online version of the article later. This is also quite handy when adding citations to a paper.
Yep also imports existing PDFs. You can corral all of your PDFs using collections and tags. Collections function essentially like folders, and tags allow you to be more free-form in defining your documents. I find this combination handy, particularly when I’m gathering information that doesn’t fit into an existing collection but may be useful at some point in the future. I assign it a tag, and after a while if I find myself with a bunch of PDFs using the same tag, I can drop them all into a collection.
I’ve gathered an absurd number of sources for this paper, and Yep has been extremely helpful in keeping them all straight. However, I did learn a few things that would have made the process of moving from initial research to adding citations easier. For one thing, although I assigned tags to all of the files I brought into Yep, I should have also given the files more descriptive names. The more granular you can get with tags and file names, the better. It makes finding them easier. Each PDF in Yep has its own notes field, which I should have used more extensively. A quick note for each PDF would have helped me quickly sift between similar documents. In general, I should have assumed that every PDF I brought into Yep would be used as a source for my paper. Many of the online sources that seemed only marginally useful at first became important later, and I had to fire up my browser and backtrack just to get the URL for them. Next time I’ll take the extra few seconds to fill in the Yep info for each file more thoroughly.
Yep has a few limitations. I amassed a several dozen documents, totaling over 2,000 pages, and I found Yep’s search to be a bit sluggish. When searching for a particular tag or search term, Yep often shows “0 results” before it is done searching. A few seconds later, it displays the search results. Yep’s biggest shortcoming for me is that its search capability is limited to metadata. That is, you can search by selection, tag, or document name, but you can’t search inside the documents themselves. Yep is really oriented more toward organizing PDFs. It does allow page by page viewing of documents, but also provides an “Open Externally” button so you can use the more full-featured PDF viewing capabilities of Preview.
Despite these minor gripes, Yep was an indispensable organization tool as I wrote the report. It has some slick touches, too. Mouse over a PDF thumbnail, and the cursor becomes a magnification pointer. If you have a .Mac account, Yep will also automatically sync some or all of your PDFs to your iDisk. Want to mail a PDF to someone? It’s a one-click affair with Yep.
Although I didn’t have occasion to use Yep in this fashion, it includes features designed to make scanning and archiving of hard copy documents as PDFs easier. If you have a lot of paper documents that need converting to PDF, Yep may be just the ticket.
Currently (as of version 1.1.2) Yep is free, but there are plans afoot to offer the next version for “a modest fee.” I’d willingly pay a modest fee for an application this helpful. Grab it from www.yepthat.com.
15 Comments
Have you tried using Yojimbo to corral web archives, pdfs etc? I am using both Yojimbo and Yep at the moment and I can’t deide which one I like best for school.
BTW, thanks so much for the omnigraffle templates, I had been trying to set OG up for my schedule but could never get it to work well!
Thanks
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
It is a dilemma. I use both Yep and Yojimbo, and generally speaking, I use Yep in cases where I’m gathering PDFs for a specific purpose (like a report). When I have little one-off single-page PDFs, they generally go into Yojimbo. For example, when I make online purchases, I usually print the receipt as a PDF and drop it into Yojimbo in the same folder where I put serial # info.
Glad you liked the Omni Graffle templates. Keep me posted if you have ideas for content or if you’d like to write something for MLS.
I am searching desperately of a tool to comment on and highlight PDF’s – this seems like such a critical function, considering how many papers I have to read in PDF format – typically I resort to printing them out and using my red pen to write notes in the margins and highlight important sentences. While there are the text and oval annotation functions in Preview, these are quite primitive. Any recommendations?
Thanks,
DAN
Hi Dan,
When I need to highlight and make comments, I use Acrobat Professional. It works well enough for me, but I only need to highlight and make comments occasionally. Your mileage may vary. That said, it is a rather robust tool and can be helpful when you need to do things like combine several PDFs into one, or modify an existing PDF and resave it.
You can get Acrobat Pro for $135 or so with academic pricing. Unfortunately, Adobe in its infinite wisdom provides a 30-day trial for the Windows version, but no trail for the Mac version. I obtained it as part of an overall Creative Suite upgrade. Since I really use Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign more than Acrobat Pro, the latter was really just an extra benefit of the upgrade. I’m not sure it’s worth $135, but I suppose if you have to do a lot of annotation work with PDFs, it might be.
Hope this helps,
Erik
Hi Erik,
where can I find the “Save to Yep” function?
Thanks in advance
Patrick,
It’s actuallly the “Add to Yep” command. I wrote it down incorrectly in the article. The “Add to Yep” command is invoked from within your web browser. If you’re at a page you want to save as a PDF in Yep, go to File > Print. Select the PDF button in the lower left corner of the save dialog box, and select “Add to Yep” from the options.
I checked in Camino, Firefox, Safari, and Shiira, and it works like a charm in all four. It is a service, so it should work fine in any OS X browser.
Hm, that’s strange, I don’t have this option in my print dialog.
That is strange. Are you using OS X 10.4? There’s a support discussion here that might be helpful: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/yepsoftware/
Yes I’m using OS X 10.4.8.
Thanks for the link, will ask for support there.
Greetings
For a free PDF annotator check out the newly released Skim.
It looks like Skim could be useful for annotation, but isn’t explicitly designed for managing multiple PDFs. Since Acrobat isn’t cheap, this could be a nice tool to use in conjunction with Yep.
Thanks for the tip, Derick.
Skim is at: http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/.
“I am searching desperately of a tool to comment on and highlight PDF’s – this seems like such a critical function, considering how many papers I have to read in PDF format ”
Check out the Annotation menu in Preview
*Check out the Annotation menu in Preview*
It is to add notes. You cannot highlight text. And the notes, once you save the document, can’t be modified, moved, or deleted.
That one sucks…
Skim is **the** application to use for notation and highlighting pdfs.
Response to Dan regarding a PDF annotating software on mac: Have you tried PDF Studio? Its GUI could need a revamp but the software itself is quite powerful.