pdf-autorename.sh

SpringerLink makes it very hard to download conference proceedings (which cost money, by the way). One is expected to click on every single PDF and give it a meaningful name (other than fulltext.pdf) manually.

In order to automate this process one can proceed as follows: Install some automatic downloader plugin for your browser, such as Down Them All for Firefox. Download all the pdfs in the overview page at SpringerLink. (One needs to adapt the filename pattern such that the files get different names than fulltext.pdf)

Then you can download my script pdf-autorename.sh in order to rename the pdfs automatically. It attempts to fetch the title using a cascade of pdftothtml, grep of <TITLE> and finally html-to-text using w3m. Hence, you will need the programs pdftohtml and w3m to run the script. A oneliner to rename all pdf files in the current directory could like the following:

% for f in *.pdf ; do pdf-autorename.sh "${f}" ; done

However, do not expect too much black magic - it is only a very simple script.