When editing incomplete data one currently has to first open the PDF in a new window then go back and copy the data between two windows. It would be nicer if the edit window would notice when there is a PDF attached and show you the first page of the PDF (either the actual file so you can copy and paste, or just an image preview so you can at least look up the author, title, date, etc.). This would be really helpful for when data is incomplete or incorrect.
I wanted to update/modify this request.
On the Mac OS X desktop I frequently use “Cover Flow” to organize PDFs. They often download with unreadable names like 3948731983.pdf and Cover Flow lets me scroll threw them and file them much easier than just looking at the file name does. I don’t expect Paperpile to implement these kind of animations and graphics in a web app, but it seems to me that the ability to edit metadata from within the PDF view, combined with the ability to navigate to the next/previous PDF from within PDF view would accomplish the same thing.
This would be useful even if Paperpile has the correct metadata for a PDF, as it is sometimes easier to assign tags and folders based on actually viewing the PDF rather than just the metadata. A quick scan of the PDF sometimes makes me realize that the title is somewhat misleading or not what I thought it was. And many sites for acquiring social science PDFs don’t seem to provide proper abstracts, so reading the first few paragraphs can help a lot.
Actually a combined PDF/edit view had been planned right from the beginning but we never actually did it. We are aware that the edit dialog itself can be improved (e.g with autocompletion see your post here)
We will re-think the complete workflow and keep that in mind. I like cover flow on the mac and use it all the time. The problem in the context of a wabapp is having readable thumbnails available for thousands of papers. It’s a performance issue and we don’t want to slow things down by adding this feature.