I think part of the problem here is also that different people have different ideas of what “offline” should look like:
- Offline searching for articles (by meta-data or full-text) - i.e. finding an article to read or cite. If you can sync the Drive folder containing your PDFs and use a desktop search engine then this can be worked around.
- Offline citing of articles in Google Docs (since Docs works offline)
- Offline management of your library (tagging, sorting, etc.)
Once the Word plugin is released, I guess that will be the next request - to insert citations into a Word doc offline.
Personally I think if the library were available offline in a limited way and usable for inserting citations that would be wonderful; I can deal with the PDFs another way. Having said that, in an ideal world I would then simply point Paperpile offline to my locally sync’d folder to open the PDF in my OS.