paperful documentation

New here? The landing page is paperful.app. This guide is the reference. Not affiliated with paperful.io.

Paperful cleans a reference library, finds missing PDFs, and summarises papers, then keeps an on-disk mirror you can back up and move. It is not a sync service. Five jobs: library, find, completeness, mirror, control. snowball grows the library (metadata parents). run fills PDFs for items already there. See Why paperful, Snowball, and how a hop is cut.

The live catalogue is an adapter. Zotero is well tested. Mendeley and EndNote adapters are in the tree and seeking testers. Open access first; campus EZProxy when you have a subscription; playbooks you write, and an opt-in AI browser, cover grey literature and field-specific sites. Paperful does not fetch every paywalled or DOI-less item. Sci-Hub is opt-in and off by default.

Work happens on disk (out/, state/). snapshot / restore write that mirror and recreate only missing items. An optional local-first LLM (Ollama or LiteLLM; off until you enable it) adds grounded title proposals, a PDF identity check, summarize notes, a synthesize report over those notes, and recover (last run lane after other browser lanes fail, or paperful recover --item) — see LLM.

Narrow a run with --collection / --library, plus optional --year-from / --year-to and --type / -T. Save that slice as a profile and repeat it with paperful all. Details in Commands and Workflows.

Operators clone the repo and run docker compose build. The image is build-local only: no docker pull, no PyPI. Docker packs Python, Poppler, and Chromium; Zotero and headed session login still run on the host. Contributors use uv (see the GitHub README Develop section).

The GitHub README is the same first-run story. 0.x flags may still move; see releases.

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