The Newsroom

We’re happy to announce the availability of Papers for iOS 1.9.2 in the App Store! This newest release introduces some exciting new features which we thought you might want to see in action. Namely, we’ve added support for PDF hyperlinks, as well as for Table of Contents and improved the workflow with library proxies. Papers for Mac has also been updated to version 1.9.7.

PDF hyperlinks

Many research papers and book PDFs include links within the document, and links to outside resources. New to Papers for iPad 1.9.2, you can follow these links simply by tapping on them, for instance to jump to a figure that is referenced in the text, or to the bibliography. You can also follow links to outside documents. In the below screenshot, the “Supplemental Materials and Methods” link has just been tapped. Papers lets you view the linked supplemental material web page link either in Safari, or directly within the app. Links can also point to other research papers, and Papers naturally creates you a new reference entry for each link you follow, and lets you download the PDF for it similarly as you are used to. Navigating research literature has never been this easy!

Table of Contents

Some PDF documents also include a Table of Contents. New to version 1.9.2, you can access it using Papers (see screenshot below). A “Go to Page” function is now also included.

Login / Authenticate

Accessing journals that require authentication can be tricky when you’re outside an institutional network which grants you access to content. Sometimes you come across research paper links that cannot be recognised by your library proxy. We now improve your workflow in these situations by introducing a “Login / Authenticate” function, similar to what is already available in Papers for Mac. The two screenshots below demonstrate this new function:

After tapping the “Login/Authenticate” button and entering your username and password for the proxy, you can get access to the full-text PDF (tap the PDF link to download the document):

Release notes

You’ll find a complete change log below, including both new features and bug fixes. If you come across any issues, please contact us.

New features:

• Hyperlink support for PDFs: follow links in the document, or to outside URLs such as web pages or other publications.
• Table of Contents support for PDFs. You’ll find it as a tab in the Bookmarks view.
• A “Go to page” function included in the Table of Contents tab.
• Added a “Login/Authenticate” option in the address bar, which lets you reload the current page through the EZProxy. This issimilar to the Login/Authenticate function in Papers for Mac.
• You can log into iDisk using either your username or email address.

Other improvements from version 1.9.1:

• Improved stability and performance with large PDFs.
• Improved stability with PDFs which do not conform strictly to the specification.
• Improved document loading speed.- Settings view: keyboard handling improved such that the EZProxy URL field is shown correctly.
• Fixed the issue whereby the navigation bar would disappear after syncing on the iPad.- Correct handling of text encoding in Google Scholar results: languages with such as Russian, Korean.

Papers for Mac has also been updated to Version 1.9.7!

Today we are very happy to release the version 1.9 of Papers for iPad, and iPhone. This update improves the app in a number ways, ranging from a fresh look and feel, Dropbox support, importing and exporting of annotated PDFs, and all-around stability improvements. We really hope you enjoy using it! Below you can read more about what’s new, and also about what’s coming next.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank Matias and congratulate him with his first mekentosj release. Matias has worked very hard to get all the stuff below in your hands as quickly as he could after he joined in September. After updating to version 1.9 I hope you will agree that he has done a killer job, and we’re sure that this will only be the beginning!

New improved look & feel.

Papers for iOS 1.9 introduces a new, exciting look & feel. Our goal wasn’t just to make Papers prettier for you. Whether you’re reading a paper, browsing your library, Google Scholar search results, or a journal website for a paper, we wanted to give you more space on the screen to concentrate on what you’re doing, both on the iPad and on the iPhone.

The most apparent visual change on the iPad is the new sidebar which you can hide by tapping anywhere on the screen. You can simply tap again to bring the sidebar back into view with its navigation, bookmark and sharing controls. The landscape viewing mode on the iPad has also been improved, allowing you to read your papers with a more natural vertical scrolling mode.

Importing papers to your library from Dropbox or iDisk.

You can import papers to your library from either Dropbox or iDisk volumes. Go to “Import papers”, then choose either your Dropbox or iDisk account, log in and browse to the PDF you want to import. We have received a lot of requests for this feature, so we really hope you enjoy it!

Improved PDF annotation support in Papers for iPad

PDF highlighting support has been extended to a far larger range of PDFs in Papers 1.9, so if you previously had problems highlighting PDFs, now might be a good time to try again. Highlights are also merged more intelligently, so you shouldn’t see partial words being highlighted anymore.

One highly requested annotation feature which we’ve added in 1.9 is the ability to import highlights and notes made in other applications to Papers for iPad. Exporting annotated PDFs from Papers is also now possible.

We continue to extend the annotation support in Papers, so stay tuned for further improvements coming your way!

A number of other changes have also made it to version 1.9:

• All-around stability improvements.
• Reading password protected PDFs. Passwords for PDFs that you have opened are stored securely in your keychain, so you only have to enter them once.
• Papers remembers the last opened page in all the papers in your library, not just the last one you had open.
• Papers remembers the last search keyword in your library.
• A “Locate with Google” was button introduced to help finding PDFs for reference entries which are missing one.
• Ability to download papers from IEEE has been restored.
• Ability to download papers from JSTOR has been restored.
• Syncing is more reliable. In particular, importing papers from Mail or iTunes functions more reliably.
• iOS 4.2 support: AirPrint and background applications.

Available via iTunes now

Papers for iOS 1.9 is a free update for existing users, available via iTunes now.
For more info and screenshots see http://news.papersapp.com/papers/ipad

What’s next?

Keeping your Papers library in sync between your Mac and iPad,  iPhone or iPod Touch is one of the key features of the software which we build. Being able to sync is also a substantial technical challenge. There is much room for improvement in how Papers currently handles syncing, and we are indeed already working on a new syncing implementation which we really want to get right. The new syncing functionality which will arrive in a further update should resolve many of the issues that you might have experienced.

In addition to Papers for iOS 1.9, we have also released Papers for Mac 1.9.6, a bugfix release of our popular Mac version of Papers Download from here…