Docear 1.1 Beta Released: New PDF Metadata Extraction, Better Zotero and Mendeley BibTeX support, and Bug Fixes

If you have tested the Preview of Docear 1.1 you may already know about some of Docear’s new features. With your feedback and the mind maps, log files and BibTeX files you shared with us, these features have matured. We are proud to introduce the first (and hopefully only) Beta release of Docear 1.1.

The new key features of Docear 1.1

Improved metadata retrieval

Thanks to your donations, our student Christoph greatly enhanced Docear’s PDF metadata retrieval. For us, it works really great, and with Docear 1.1 Beta the last bugs have been fixed. Btw. if you like what Christoph did, and if you are using LibreOffice, or OpenOffice, please also read our call for donation to develop an add-on for these two text processing tools.

Improved support for Zotero / Mendeley BibTeX files

Docear 1.1 features improved support for BibTeX files created by Zotero or Mendeley. As you may know there is no real BibTeX standard and there are lots of different dialects out there.Some of our Mendeley users were not able to use Docear because of duplicated references in the BibTeX files created by Mendeley. While previous versions of Docear required references to match PDF files unambiguously you can now choose to ignore all duplicate references.

If you select to ignore duplicates, Docear will basically accept the first matching reference instead of making sure that it will always use the same one. We plan to further enhance BibTeX support with some fundamental changes to the user interface and workflow. Working with Docear will become a lot easier. Please stay tuned for more information!

Avoiding data loss

We have implemented some changes which reduce the – very low – risk to experience data loss with Docear. In the past, data loss could happen when Docear was saving a mind-map (which usually takes a fraction of a second), and just in this moment Docear was closed forcefully, e.g. by a computer crash (blue screen on Windows systems) or by killing the Java or Docear process manually. To overcome this issue, Docear now creates temporary files (e.g. “~my_mindmap.mm”) first and only if the saving attempt ended successfully we overwrite the existing mind map file (e.g. “my_mindmap.mm”). Of course you should also consider to use our backup features to make sure that you can get your mind maps back, even if your hard drive breaks.

Support of Windows network drives

Docear now supports Windows network drives to be used as literature repository. If you want to share your PDF files with other researchers over a network drive you are now good to go.

The full changelog (since Docear 1.0.3 stable – our last official version):

You can view the tickets in detail on this site: https://github.com/Docear/Desktop/issues?milestone=17&state=closed

New features and feature improvements:

• Improved PDF Metadata Extraction wizard
• Request metadata from Google Scholar
• fixed Mendeley and Zotero BibTeX file updater
• easy fix for duplicate entries in BibTeX files
• windows network paths were not working correctly when used in Docear workspace
• make saving of Docear mind map files safer
• “Show in reference manager” works with multiple PDF files
• ‘Esc’ key executes ‘cancel’ button in wizard
• open filetype specific application in duplicated reference warning dialog

Bug fixes:

• broken BibTeX file freezes Docear on startup
• “My Mindmaps” backup page does not work using Firefox or Opera
• caught exception thrown when Windows registry could not be read correctly
• Drag&Drop for already referenced PDFs is not working
• MultiLineActionLabel link mark (underline) is not wrapped correctly
• components sometimes leave the visible area of the metadata extraction wizard
• Removing line breaks by default did not work

Downloading this version:

• Windows
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• All OS combined
• The docear source code is available as a ZIP file or on github.