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jimmejardine / qiqqa-open-source

The open-sourced version of the award-winning Qiqqa research management tool for Windows
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Database compatibility and future of Qiqqa #427

Open snunez1 opened 5 months ago

snunez1 commented 5 months ago

I'm newly returned academic, at a business/computer school. Things have changed a lot in the last 30 years, and in my area it's mostly the speed of change of the technology and applications, so I am looking for a tool to help me manage the read->digest->publish workflow.

Qiqqa seems to tick most of the boxes, at least in the sense that it seems more than a reference manager and includes a workflow manager. However in reading through the comments here (e.g. #280, #409), it seems that the future of the existing application is at a dead-end, for technical reasons I fully understand.

So at the moment I'm trying to decide what tool to invest in. Tagging and otherwise adding metadata to a PDF library is going to be non-trivial, and I don't want to have to do it again if I have to switch tools, so I'd like to ask a few questions here to help me understand the options:

  1. @GerHobbelt seems to be working on a mupdf fork, where the activity seems slow but steady. Is this generally considered to be the continuation of Qiqqa, i.e. QiqqaNG?
  2. If so, will the database format be compatible? I ask this because I want to know if my investment in adding meta-data can be preserved and used in future Qiqqa applications. If mupdf, or other forks, are the future of Qiqqa it would be ideal if there is an upgrade path for existing users.
  3. Finally, it's worth asking because anyone reading this is likely to have a similar set of requirements: are there any alternatives? I don't have experience with Zotero, however in my reading it appears to be more of a reference/citation manager. Are there any alternatives to Qiqqa that I've missed that are more geared toward a publishing workflow?
klmckinney commented 4 months ago

Hi Snunez1,

I have some similar needs to you.

I've been working with Qiqqa on and off for about 4 years now. I spent some time studying the program and the WPF framework and was kind of "going in circles". Then I realized most of my needs/issues were involved with interaction with the database component of Qiqqa.

Since the database is SQLite3 it is very easy to manipulate, I started doing modifications directly in the database, rather than in Qiqqa. Mostly I use python scripts, but you can really do modifications however you like. Then I would restart Qiqqa and continue work with the now modified database. If you follow some fairly simple steps and perform the manipulations in a manor that is compatible with Qiqqa, you can extend Qiqqa's usefulness without modifying the Qiqqa executable!

This won't work for every need, but it works for me!

So in my world, my Sqlite3 database (the "Qiqqa.Library" file) is key. It holds Qiqqa data, but it can also be extended with other data, and with some scripting can easily interact with other tools.

If you take my approach, just remember to keep backups of the library file. Nothing is more painful than an inadvertent "drop table *" !