Alexandria

Summaries that read as they were written, and an application that can say what it did.

• Paper summaries are rendered as Markdown: headings, nested lists, quotations and code blocks, instead of the asterisks and backticks they used to show
• The OpenAlex API key can be set in Preferences, rather than only by editing a configuration file by hand
• Help → Show Log, with a Copy button for pasting into a bug report — there is no terminal to read when the application is launched from an icon
• The status bar names the file it is talking about, and says when a paper has been added
• Papers whose files have been moved or deleted no longer cost a network lookup on every launch

A first run that asks where your library should live, looking a paper up from a half-remembered citation, and Retraction Watch in the feed.

• A first run asks where your library should live instead of deciding for you — one click accepts the suggested folder, the other chooses any other
• Discover "By citation": find a paper from its first author, year and journal, or paste a citation and have those three filled in for you
• Follow Retraction Watch, with the article's picture on the card where its feed carries one
• Alexandria knows which folders its Flatpak may open, so a PDF dragged in from out of reach says so rather than reporting "no PDFs found"
• A citing-impact score cut short by a rate limit is marked "(partial)" and recomputed, rather than cached for thirty days as though it were the answer

Preprints you can follow, finding your way around a long author page, and references that come to you instead of moving you.

• Follow bioRxiv subject collections — each subject keeps its own feed
• Find within an author's works: it highlights rather than filters, so the order of the list is kept
• Clicking a citation shows the reference where you are reading; "Go to reference" still makes the trip
• Cited-by and Related-works rows say whether a paper is open access, and which kind
• pdfx is no longer a dependency — it was archived in 2023 and could hang an import indefinitely
• Clicking a page in the viewer's sidebar took you to the next one
• On some papers every citation was listed twice, and the click took the copy that led nowhere
• An AI summary could show its Markdown raw
• arXiv papers took their landing-page URL as their DOI

Authors and their photographs are shared across catalogues, funding is tracked, preprints are searchable, and the long waits now say what they are doing.

• One authors database and one author-photo store for every catalogue — the same person is no longer a stranger in your other library
• Funders on papers, and UKRI Gateway to Research grants an author holds as PI or Co-I
• Preprints in Discover, searched at Europe PMC, and preprint PDFs download from bioRxiv and medRxiv
• "Get PDF" and importing both narrate what they are doing instead of sitting on one line for half a minute
• A paper that prints no DOI anywhere can still be identified, from its title
• Copy one paper as BibTeX or RIS from its own card
• Sort the author list by surname, by when you added them, or by when they first published
• A keyboard-shortcuts window, and press-and-hold now opens every context menu a right-click does
• Highlights and their comments are visible in the metadata editor
• Dropping several PDFs at once no longer freezes the window, and a PDF that duplicates a BibTeX entry is attached to it however it arrived
• Citations no longer crash on a page range, and numbered styles put a space after the number