Reader is a minimalist PDF viewer with powerful views and controls, including Augmented Copy which allows you to copy as citation. It takes advantage of the PDF enabled Visual-Meta PDFs from the Author word processor and supports Liquid Commands.

 

 

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Update for Version 1.6

 

  • When you open a PDF which has a DOI on the first page, it will ask you if you want Reader to auto-assign citation Visual-Meta
  • cmd- to fold the document into an outline
  • Select text and cmd-f to fold the document to show only lines with the selected text
  • 'n' to see any names in your document
  • 'h' on selected text to highlight
  • 'h' to see any highlighted text

 

Future Plans (2020)

 

  • Click on Citations [1] to see a full Reference information
  • Select text and cmd-f and if the text is in the Glossary, the definition will appear at tht top of the Find results.
  • Click on Footnotesa to see footnote text in a pop-up

 

To Enable Augmented Copy

 

To enable Augmented Copy (where you can copy text from the PDF and paste it into a word processor as a citation) open the PDF Reader and copy theBibTex or DOI of the PDF, which you can find either on the download page or in the document, and paste it into the document. The citation information will now be appended to the end of the document. That’s it, you can now copy as full citation to Author. In version 1.6 Reader even attempts to do this for you automatically:

 

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Safari Speed Hint

 

If you click on a link to a PDF in Safari while holding down the 'option' key the document will download to your 'Downloads' folder instead of opening in a new tab so if you have the Downloads folder open, you can quickly open the document in Reader.

 

Chrome Extension

 

The interaction shown above is simplified if you install the Google Chrome Visual-Meta Extension: Video demo The Visual-Meta Extension for Chrome automatically finds the BibTeX Export Format for citations when you download a PDF documents from the a website (ACM Digital Library is the first fully tested site) and appends the BibTeX to the PDF as a Visual-Meta element. But that's not the exciting part:

 

You can then use Reader for macOS and copy any text from your PDF and paste into Author as a full citation.

 

This is a usable and useful demonstration of the Visual-Meta approach. Future updates aim to support more download sites.