PDF Rename — Academic Paper Organizer

Rename academic PDFs to: [Year] [Venue] Title.pdf

Three-stage pipeline:

Extract → Verify → Rename

Anti-error principle: Never re-parse PDF content during Rename. The Manifest is the single source of truth.

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Quick Start

# Stage 1: Extract raw text → manifest.json
python scripts/extract.py "<folder_path>"

# Stage 2: LLM parses raw_text → inject verified data → manifest_verified.json
#   (Agent reads manifest.json raw_text field and writes to scripts/VERIFIED_DATA_*.py)
python scripts/apply_verified.py "<folder_path>"

# Stage 3: Preview / Execute
python scripts/execute.py "<folder_path>" --preview
python scripts/execute.py "<folder_path>" --execute

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Stage 1: Extract

What it does:

• Reads first 3 pages of each PDF
• Stores raw text in manifest.json → raw_text field
• Extracts year_hint from filename prefix
• Detects potential duplicates by filename similarity

Manifest schema — see references/manifest_spec.md

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Stage 2: Verify

The agent reads manifest.json, parses each raw_text field, and writes verified metadata.

Steps:

1. Read manifest.json
2. For each entry, parse the raw_text to extract: title, authors, venue, year, abstract
3. Create or update scripts/VERIFIED_DATA_*.py with verified entries

VERIFIED_DATA format:

VERIFIED_DATA = {
    "OriginalFilename.pdf": {
        "title": "Correct Paper Title",
        "year": "2024",
        "venue": "NeurIPS",
        "confirmed": True   # must be True to be renamed
    },
}

Rules:

• Key must exactly match the original filename
• confirmed: True → status becomes ready → will be renamed
• confirmed: False or omitted → skipped
• Multiple VERIFIED_DATA_*.py files are auto-merged
• Prefer venue/conference year over filename year (e.g., arXiv 2022 → NeurIPS 2024)

⚠️ Key gotchas during parsing:

• Multi-line titles: pypdf concatenates lines without spaces (e.g., "Direct score maximization outperformsplanning loss") — use context to infer correct split
• Journal refs at top of page: "Math. Program. (2012) 133..." is NOT the title — read further
• arXiv papers: use conference year if published, otherwise use arXiv year
• Non-paper files (book chapters, lecture notes, loss curves): set confirmed: False and skip

Then run:

python scripts/apply_verified.py "<folder_path>"

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Stage 3: Rename

• Only status == 'ready' files are renamed
• Duplicate titles → (1), (2) suffixes
• Backup created at <folder>/_backup_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS/

python scripts/execute.py "<folder_path>" --preview   # dry run
python scripts/execute.py "<folder_path>" --execute   # rename

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Scripts

Script	Purpose
scripts/extract.py	Stage 1: extract raw PDF text → manifest.json
scripts/apply_verified.py	Stage 2: inject verified metadata → manifest_verified.json
scripts/execute.py	Stage 3: rename files (preview or execute)
scripts/llm_parse.py	(Optional) programmatic LLM parsing via gateway API

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Known Failure Modes

Symptom	Cause	Fix
raw_text empty	PDF is a scan	Skip (confirmed: False) or manually determine metadata
Title extracted without spaces	pypdf concatenates lines	LLM infers from context; use filename as hint
Wrong year (arXiv ≠ conference)	Used filename year	Use venue year from raw_text, not filename
DOI/journal ref at top of page	Metadata precedes title	Read past it — title is usually after
Middle-dot author lines misidentified	· separator in names	LLM handles via semantic understanding
Non-paper files renamed	No filter applied	Set confirmed: False for non-papers
Windows filename encoding garbled	Chinese/non-ASCII chars in PowerShell	Use Python scripts, not manual file ops
Ligature artifacts	PDF encoding (e.g., fi → fi)	clean_title_text() in extract.py handles these

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References

• references/manifest_spec.md — Full manifest JSON schema
• references/venue_abbrev.md — Standard venue abbreviation map