Renaming PDF filenames

I’ve released an update to Lazy Scholar today (version 0.4.0) that adds a new feature: renaming PDF filenames.

Usually when you download a PDF from a journal it looks something like “ioi80118_2268_2275.pdf”. This is not helpful when you are trying to find it later in your download folder. Lazy Scholar now attempts to rename the file as you download it to “year_first author_journal.pdf” as a default. You can customize this naming order by right clicking the icon and clicking “Options”. If Lazy Scholar cannot find the paper or there is some error it provides a prompt to enter a custom name or you can leave it empty to use the journal’s default filename.

By default, this feature is turned on and requires new permissions: “downloads” is needed to change the filename, and “http://entrezajax.appspot.com/” is needed to fetch paper data from NCBI Entrez. You can turn it off completely in Options.

This was a bit difficult to accomplish and I needed to use several inefficient methods to make it work, so there are likely bugs that I missed in testing. Please post links in the comments if there is something unexpected, or comment if you would like additional order customization options.

Thanks to Michael Eisen for this feature idea.