Automators 8: File Automation

Episodes
21

What I do (with BibDesk) is have Hazel check for DOIs & stick everything with a DOI into a folder that I just drag in once a week or so. There’s enough lousy bibliographic data out there that I like to check it anyway. Stuff without DOIs languishes in an Articles to file manually folder…

22

Incidentally that’s why I’ve never switched despite trialing it several times over the years - BibDesk has such a robust AS dictionary and script hooks. There’s so much busy work in citation management I want to be able to automate as much as possible.

23

I don’t know if I could do without ZotHero to be honest, I use it that much, but I’m thinking I could automate putting my newspaper archives and others into Bibdesk, and then import that data into zotero en masse every now and then. Thanks for putting my onto BibDesk.

Do you think it would be possible to use a combination of hazel, KM and applescript to do the following?

  1. Download a pdf file from a newspaper archive site to a hazel watched folder
  2. Have hazel recognise the file from the downloaded site or content creator to rename the file
  3. Automatically import into BibDesk using the filename to create the date, title, journal fields?

(I can do the first two steps)

24

If you have the info, it’s not hard to create a BibTeX file with the info ready to import - Hazel could do that in step 2, and have BibDesk add it. You can actually bypass the file creation stage and have Hazel run an AppleScript that creates the publication record. See http://bibdesk-users.661331.n2.nabble.com/importing-PDFs-td7578078.html for some examples.

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25

Even though I have many automation tools on my Mac, I’ve struggled trying to come up with something that I can automate, given my sporadic workflows.

@RosemaryOrchard mentioned a Hazel rule to delete installers in the downloads directory. Gray idea. Yes, slow web pages, I’ve clicked download many times. I have many filenames that look like
they are declaring an array in Visual Basic. :sunglasses:

While thinking about that rule, I’ll also create one to delete dmg & pkg files in that same folder.

Finally, some automation in my life.

1 Like