I've been trying very hard to wean myself off printing documents on paper of late, partly to be more environmentally friendly and partly because I've go a bad back. Instead I've been using technology solutions to manage all the documents I have to read, and as a research scientist that means pdf files, above all else.

First, I had to catalogue them. Fir this I tried a paid (though inexpensive) app called PDF Stacks (http://pdfstacks.com/) but I found it quite clunky in it's approach to indexing files using the metadata. In the end I settled on Mendeley, which does much the same job but is free fro entry level users (http://www.mendeley.com/). It also allows connecting with other users in a LindedIn kind of way and also online storage of files and sharing, much as in Cite-U-Like, although the latter is much more labour-intensive. Mendeley is by no means perfect. It's implementaion of bibliography generation is poor as yet and about one in three files catalogued needs some degree of amnual indexing, but this is as likely to be a result of bad metadata as anything else.

How about reading the documents though? Even the best PC display, being backlit, is awful for reading for any length of time because it causes eye strain and also, it's generally in the wrong format (i.e. landscape), unless it supports rotation.

I was eagerly awaiting the launch of the Hearst group's Skiff reader with a metal foil e-ink enhanced display, measuring a whopping 11.5 inches diagonally. Sadly, the developing company got bought out but the tech rights didn't, effectively killing the product at the prototype stage. A good (and at the moment only) alternatives are tablet such as the iPad, Galaxy Tab or Adam, all expensive, heavy and suffering from the backlight problem, or the Amazon Kindle DX. Ok, the latter doesn't do colour and the annotation support in pdf's is non-existent at the moment but the e-ink display is crisp and large enough to view entire pages of A4 pdf's without squinting. the capacity could be larger (it's currently an un-expandable 3.3GB) but apart from that, I love it.

One problem remains however: rationally naming thousands of pdf files without hiring help to do it before you die of old age, so that you can find the paper you want easily. I've tried several products but the one that gives the most consistently predictable and satisfactory results is a-pdf-rename, one of dozens of neat, low cost packages from the eponymous a-pdf company for doing pretty much anything legal you can think of to your pdf's. You can download a trial at http://www.a-pdf.com/rename/, but I guarantee you'll end up more than happy to pay for it at only $27.

I only wish they did mix and match bundles of software because the range of functionality in their products is vast, from scanning documents into PDF format to stripping out images and merging files. If you use PDF's a lot, eventually you WILL end up using one of their products. And quite right too.

Anyhow, back to the paperless office...