Paperq: a tool for managing a reading queue of academic literature

Question

paperq is a command-line tool for managing a reading queue of academic literature.   It's usage is simple: you add files to the queue and then you run it without arguments to open the next file in the queue. The queue part of the code itself is rather simple but paperq also offers some other nice features:
Add files (-a option)
Remove a file (-r option)
Display info on a file. Given a BibTeX file,  print the bibliographic information, otherwise print the file location (-i option)
List all files (or bibliographic information) in the queue (-l option)
Create an archive (tar.gz) of the papers in the queue, prepending the file names with the queue position (-z option)
Operate on any file in the queue, instead of the head, via the -n option
Peek at a file (open it, but don't remove it from the queue) via the -p option
Print a file (-t option)
Configurable file-opening command (xdg-open %s, by default)
Documentation is available in the README file or on the website (see below). A man page is also included.
I've been using it myself now that I finally stopped using Mendeley. I find it to be quite handy, so I've packaged it up to be shared with others.
Screenshot showing the bibliographic info:
Website
AUR
Last edited by jakobcreutzfeldt (2014-01-28 09:15:50)

Answer 1

I just uploaded version 1.1.1.  I somehow missed a bug in which the first word of the author list was being chopped off. It's fixed.
marttt wrote:Thanks very much for this! I can finally ditch some of my ugly scripts now. Have you considered adding other bibliographic data formats in the future? (Here is an interesting solution with YAML and Pandoc and, correspondingly, proper UTF-8 support.)
Glad to hear it could be of use to you! Honestly, this also just started out as a quick script but little by little I started adding more handy features.
As for other bibliographic formats, it could be possible. I'm mainly familiar with BibTeX, so I would need to see how the other formats look. 
In all honesty, the bibliographic info printing could be greatly expanded: only journal articles are supported at the moment, and mathematical expressions in the titles aren't yet supported (i.e. greek characters).  It might be more efficient in the long run to write a dedicated biblio parsing program that loads some pre-written BibTeX-parsing library rather than all the crazy sed work that's going on in there right now. If that's the case, then it's just a  matter of loading some library for a different biblio file format in order to support it.