skipa

BASH/YAD script to Read and fix PDF tags in filenames and exif metadata

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Project maintained by uriel1998 Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

skipa organizer

skipa means (“organize, arrange, place in order”) in Old Norse

Contents

1. About
2. License
3. Prerequisites
4. How to use
5. TODO

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1. About

skipa is designed to fix and write tags in PDF files so they can be organized more easily and more tool-agnostically.

I personally use three main tools for indexing and searching my PDF paperwork:

• gscan2pdf
• recoll
• TagSpaces

However, I’ve scanned PDF reciepts without adding keywords or tags or even dates before. skipa can be pointed at a single file or at an entire directory to read metadata from the PDF itself - and what is in the filename - resolve conflicts, and re-write that metadata in the file itself and in the filename.

note: I treat the metadata “Keywords” and the term “tags” interchangeably here

2. License

This project is licensed under the MIT license. For the full license, see LICENSE.

3. Prerequisites

These may already be installed on your system or easily installable by package manager.

• grep
• awk
• sed
• pdftohtml
• html2text
• file
• detox
• xpdf
• exiftool
• yad
• stat (coreutils)
• date (coreutils)

To install them on Debian, simply type sudo apt install grep gawk sed wkhtmltopdf html2text detox xpdf yad libimage-exiftool-perl coreutils file .

4. How to use

The filename format that is generated is a combination of what gscan2pdf will create and what TagSpaces creates. It is in the format:

TITLE_With_Spaces_as_underscores-YYYY-MM-DD[TAG TAG TAG].pdf

Usage is straightforward:

skipa.sh [ path_to_pdf_files | pdf_file ]

Any conflict between the metadata will be presented for resolution. Choose the appropriate radio button or choose “manual resolution” to edit during the loading process.

Once the metadata is loaded, it will all be presented in one dialog box. Additionally, the file will be loaded in xpdf to assist if all the metadata is missing. Click save to rename the file and write the metadata into the file itself.

While it uses exiftool to read and write metadata to the file, skipa is currently focusing on PDF files at this time. If asked to work in directory mode, it uses the file utility to only work on PDF files.

5. Todo

• cli-only?
• just make sure there’s no mismatches mode
• just make sure there’s no empty mode
• Mendeley renaming and metadata writing
• is there OCR mode