Xapers is a personal document indexing and management system designed primarily for academic journal articles and research papers. It provides a searchable local collection of documents, bibliographic metadata and associated reference information.
The software uses the Xapian search engine to index document contents alongside information retrieved from online academic sources. PDF documents are processed to extract their text, while bibliographic records are indexed to make references easier to locate.
Xapers is particularly useful for researchers who maintain substantial collections of academic papers and need to search both the text of documents and their bibliographic details. It combines command-line operations with a curses-based interface for browsing search results and accessing stored documents.
The application also integrates with BibTeX workflows, allowing users to reuse their reference collections when preparing academic publications with LaTeX.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Full-text indexing of PDF documents using the Xapian search engine.
- Search bibliographic information and document contents from a local collection.
- Retrieve reference metadata from online sources using identifiers such as DOIs.
- Includes source modules for DOI and arXiv reference information.
- Import existing BibTeX bibliography databases.
- Import PDF attachments referenced by JabRef and Mendeley-style BibTeX file fields.
- Organise documents using user-defined tags.
- Search for documents using bibliographic fields, text content and tags.
- Curses-based interface for navigating search results and viewing document information.
- Open stored documents and associated source URLs from the search interface.
- Export BibTeX records from search results for use in LaTeX documents.
- Provides an xapers-adder utility for importing individual PDFs, including documents opened from a web browser.
- Associate additional source information and initial tags with imported documents.
- Python library interface for accessing collections, searching records and modifying document metadata.
Website: gitlab.com/jrollins/xapers
Support:
Developer: Jameson Graef Rollins
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Xapers is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Bibliography Tools | |
|---|---|
| coBib | Simple, console-based bibliography management tool |
| Rebiber | Replaces unofficial BibTeX references with official records |
| papis | Extensible command-line based document and bibliography manager |
| bibiman | TUI for fast and simple interaction with a BibLaTeX database |
| bibtex-tidy | Cleans, sorts and formats BibTeX bibliography files |
| Hayagriva | Rusty bibliography management |
| bibman (Haskell) | CLI/TUI bibliography manager |
| pubs | Bibliography on the command line |
| BibMan | TUI bibliography manager |
| Xapers | Personal journal article management system |
| papers | Command-line tool to manage bibliography |
| Gorae | Terminal-based library manager for PDF and EPUB collections |
| CiteBib | Generate a Bibtex or LaTeX bibliography |
| bibclean | BiBTeX and Scribe bibliography prettyprinter and syntax checker |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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