pdfds in EF
I have been interested in the possibility of using Skim’s pdfds with EagleFiler for a while, but I’ve been a bit hesitant to do so for a couple of reasons.
The first thing is that if I have a regular PDF file in my library and want to annotate it, I can open it in Skim, and add the annotations, but I am still very jittery about using extended attributes because I’m still not completely confident that at some point a copy or backup operation I do might fail to copy them. So, I much prefer the idea of using a pdfd bundle file instead. Then, the notes are saved as real files that even programs that are ignorant about extended attributes should know how to handle.
However, if I want to make a bundle, that means I’ll need to Save as… a bundle, then import the new bundle into EagleFiler, file it in the right place, and remove the original bare PDF file. A small procedure, but not a real obstacle. And I can’t see a particularly good way around this.
The main thing I’m worried about is what happens when you edit in Skim in a way that causes new things to be created inside the pdfd package – EagleFiler is usually pretty unhappy if you add/remove files to/from the library folder other than within EagleFiler itself, but I don’t know if this carries over to files hiding within a package. Also: if you change the Skim notes within a pdfd, is that a change that Verify will detect?
Having just taken a look at a pdfd bundle made with Skim 1.0.3, it does not actually appear as if anything I do has the effect of adding or removing files within the bundle, so perhaps my idea that this can happen is based on the behavior of an earlier version of Skim. If so, my concern might be moot anyway.
The first basic question I have is, I guess, is it safe to edit pdfds outside EagleFiler, verify, and update the checksum (in the same way one would do for other things like Word documents)? Does it matter if it were to happen that a file is added or removed within the pdfd package?
The second question I have about using Skim like this has to do with how duplicates are detected. It would be nice for my purposes if EagleFiler would detect and refuse to import a PDF that I already have, even if it is actually within a pdfd that has Skim notes added. One of the things I like about using EagleFiler to collect my many PDF files is that I can pretty much just drop anything I come across into EagleFiler, and it will generally keep me from getting a lot of duplicates. I worry that I would lose that ability if I start taking notes with Skim on bundles within the EagleFiler library.
It’s a tricky problem, of course. If I have two pdfds based on the same PDF but with different notes, I don’t think I’d want EagleFiler to reject the second one on the basis of having the first one in the library already. So, it might be that what I’m thinking about here would require a somewhat Skim-specific solution, such as: if the file being imported is a (bare) PDF file, check it against both the PDF files in the library, and the PDF files within pdfd bundles, but if the file being imported is a pdfd bundle, check it against the other pdfd bundles in the library in their entirety, including notes. I’m not sure if this is easy or challenging, or whether this is a behavior that everyone would want, or just me.