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Motivation

Great post by GradHacker: [[http://www.gradhacker.org/2012/08/13/towards-better-pdf-management-with-the-filesystem/][Towards Better PDF Management with the Filesystem]].

Tools for organizing your PDFs are restrictive and proprietary (in the sense that information is kept hostage inside the software).

Article advocates

1. use file system: helps avoid the "proprietary data problem"
2. flat structure: keeping a single (flat) directory of all your papers
3. tags over folders: well-known problem we all faced before gmail.
4. conventions: naming conventions, tagging conventions
5. simple scripts: they don't say it directly (author is a mac user, not a linux geek), but they talk about using simple programs rather large monolithic programs.

=skid= stores all documents in a single directory called the cache (=~/.skid/marks/=). Each file in the cache has a directory associated with it where metadata and other associated data will live. These directories are named after the cached document with a '.d' suffix (for example, cached document =Cookbook.pdf= has a directory =Cookbook.pdf.d/=). The most important file living in this directory is =notes.org=. This file is where users annotated documents with bibliographic metadata (e.g. title, author, year), personal notes, and system information (e.g. source from which it was downloaded).