I saw that the file name of the PDF changed to the title of the paper, so the length of the file name was long. Because Windows limits a single path to 260 characters (including file names), this long filename can make a trouble when it is downloaded. So, I think it will be good to make the option for shortening the PDF file name.
If this option is already existed, please let me know.
Have you actually had problems with that? Paperpile already shortens file names automatically. We added this a long time ago exactly to avoid problems on windows. I don’t remember the implementation details but I don’t think there is any reason to worry.
Thank you for the reply. Actually, I didn’t experience any problems.
When I used Mendeley before, there was a trouble while transfering files from one to another computer.
That’s the reason why I was worried about this kind of situlation.
Thanks to you, I’m not worried about this problem anymore.
Actually I was wondering if there were an option to make the filenames even shorter — for instance there is a bug in ecryptfs that restricts names to 143 characters max. Can this option be made user-settable?
Alternatively, if I went and manually renamed all 464 of my PDFs with names currently too long to be synced to my encrypted partition, would that break everything?
I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer to that. We save our data correctly to Google Drive and can’t influence what happens downstream with sync clients and or file systems. It’s the responsibility of a sync client to make sure to map the files from the cloud correctly to a file system. If that does not work for whatever reason, I suggest to contact the support channels of the sync client.
It’s possible to rename a file within Paperpile but it’s not practical to do this for 400+ files.
The other way round, changing the file names in Google Drive is not possible. Paperpile will revert the file names back to the original version.
I’m new to Paperpile and migrating from Zotero where I used the Zoftfile extension to rename PDF’s after dowload. Zotfile has very flexible rule-based naming formatter and it can also batch re-name files.
This is not a deal breaker in migration, but I would prefere to use my old naming convention also after migration + have the possibility of batch renaming. Hopefully you keep this in mind with the future development roadmap.
Sorry I missed this new comment in this thread here. Please have a look here:
I actually ran into an issue with the file name length. I am using an encrypted home directory on Ubuntu and have set up a sync with the paperpile google drive folder. The file name length limit for the encrypted FS is 143, not 255. So there are a good number of articles that cannot be synced based on their file name length. I don’t need the full title to find these files (usually first author is fine) so an option to limit the file name length to < 143 chars would be very nice. @stefan: do you think that is doable?
No I’m afraid, there is no option for the file name length.
I’ve mentioned this on other places in this forum. We cannot limit our file names to the least common denominator of rules for all file systems across all operating systems.
We follow all rules of the official Google Drive API and if the client can’t sync the file, that’s a problem of the sync client and should be reported to Google.
For example, they already handle the case when there are two files with the same name. In a similar manner, they should automatically abbreviate the file name so that it can be synced correctly.