Stable links to papers in Paperpile library

I find myself often referencing a paper I store in Paperpile from some other document, e.g. Emacs org-mode file. I can of course copy a full reference to know which paper I’m mentioning. However, it would be much easier if I could simply copy a link to a paper in Paperpile (containing the paper UID). Clicking on that link would open Paperpile and the specific paper. Is that possible at the moment?

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No, that’s not implemented. You can open folders and labels but not individual papers.

The problem is that we would need to include additional user interface elements to create such a link. That would be very confusing as we already have the concept of “sharing links”. Those are actually relatively short URLs made for the purpose you describe.

They don’t link to your library though but on a separate page, e.g. https://paperpile.com/shared/kqZpAO

In any case, happy to see Emacs org-mode users using Paperpile. It seems we do something right here…

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Thanks for the quick reply. How do I get that sharing link you mention? Also, does the View PDF link to this particular PDF file or rather to the paper in general. Is the ID in https://paperpile.com/view/ the ID of the paper?

Also, I think that UI changes are not really needed. It would be enough if we could open a paper though an url containing it’s e.g. bibitex ID, for instance
https://paperpile.com/app/bibtex/pronobis2012icra

Or even activate certain search this way, e.g. https://paperpile.com/app/search/pronobis2012icra

@stefan +1 for this

We’ve added this features in our last update. You can get easily a permalink for a paper (see below). If it’s your paper it will open up in your library. If you share this link with somebody else and he or she follows the link it will convert automatically to a shared link. This means he or she will see the “XY shared a paper with you” and can access the PDF. So these links work as expected for example in a shared Trello board.

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Awesome! Thanks a lot guys!

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Ha! Great, just what we chatted about some time ago! Thanks!!

Tor

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This is a fairly old thread, but probably closely enough matches what I’m looking for.

While writing I’ll often open multiple papers for reading, and add those to my to do list (Todoist, save url as task). Now if my browser gets closed for whatever reason those urls are all in my todoist, but since these urls are not persistent they don’t link to the paper anymore.

I could use the share link option described above, but that would lead to a couple of extra clicks.

So if a pdf opened in Paperpile could have a stable, persistent url, well, that would be great :slight_smile:

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This is also important to me. Being able to quickly copy a link from the URL bar is valuable. I also use tools that depend on links, opening and restoring tabs. I actually started using the links, and discovered that they only work (sometimes) after multiple refreshes…

I’m happy to discuss implementation options briefly if that would be helpful (I’ve been a product designer and chrome extension engineer at various times). There are a few fiddly details to really get this as usable as would be ideal.

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Thanks for reviving this thread, @paperpiler. I can’t say whether we’ll be able to prioritize this topic yet but I’ve added your +1 to the topic on our internal tracker. I made note of your expertise / willingness to discuss in case the team is open to reaching out at some point.

Seconding peperpiler’s comment and expanding on it a bit. I work in Chrome and use windows and their tabs to manage projects (e.g. one window per paper I’m writing). I also use add ons like Workona and Toby to help with this so that I can easily close and reopen projects as needed. Ideally, if I save the url to a pdf I’m viewing in a project (the above programs automate this kind of thing), I should be able to use this link to reopen the document later. Right now when these programs reopen my workspaces, the Paperpile urls are all broken.

PS Here’s what the error message looks like in Chrome: