Introduction

Today I was bringing some magazines with me on the train. Even though I have a laptop, i still like reading magazines on paper. This is partially due to the fact that reading from paper is easier, and the fact that adding comments to them easier. A good tablet like laptop (there are several offerings from Toshiba, Compaq etc.) would solve these problems for me.

Still. Even with such a piece of equipment, reading a real/dead-tree magazine is easier. This is because a magazine is a magazine that you can browse from front to back. Actually, I recently downloaded a complete issue of IEEE Security & Privacy (they offer it as one giant ZIP file) for reading on the train.

But that turns out to be cumbersome: you have to open the zip archive, click each PDF file there (and there are loads of them) to open them, only to discover that they are advertisements or articles you're not interested in.

Implementation

So what I want is kind of an Acrobat Reader+. It will allow you to download a magazine as one big PDF. The table of contents contgains links to jump to whatever paper/page you desire. But (and this is the new/important bit), it also allows you to save any individual article (together with its comments and annotations) to disk as a seperate PDF file.

This way you can read a magazine like you're used to, and keep any interesting articles as separate entities for future reference.

Oh, and it would be cool if it cooperated with NetBiBTeX : showing the full corresponding BiBTeX entry, and offering a default name to save the file under equal to the citation key (cf. the Citeseer citekeys).