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First mentioned by Midas, Qiqqa is more than just an academic research tool. It also has some very powerful search and PDF annotation/manager as well. Lots of functionality under the hood and I am loving it.

Steps:

1. Download setup files and run Uniextract2
2. Launch Qiqqa.exe

Status: Not portable, writes to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Quantisle\Qiqqa\ ... tested v.79

Resources:

When not processing, took up 112 megs of RAM and very low CPU usage. 145 megs disk space.

A LOT while automatic OCR and search indexing are running. ~80% CPU usage, 600 megs of RAM. In my testing, Appdata was storing over 2 Gigs because it caches the PDF files (I was testing this with 200+ PDF files so this was especially high).

Other notes:

* Love the intro bit when the program starts, very helpful.
* It supports Apache Lucene search, which is great because it supports both proximity and fuzzy searching. It's not called out but that's what it is.

Websites
http://www.qiqqa.com/
http://www.qiqqa.com/About/Features

License: Freemium+adware. Supposedly open source but I haven't verified that. Some features (like multiple watch folders) require a paid license. The adware bit is visible in the screenshot with the "Tweet this" box. It can be collapsed but expands on restart and can't be removed. I find this less distracting than Foxit PDF's adverts.

Screenshot
(Click for larger view -- compressed with RIOT and FileOptimizer)

Some more usage notes on this ...

Registration required? Do you need to purchase it?

If you click "Don't have an account" and click "Guest account" and you can work on the program entirely from your local machine. So it's not "registerware"

There are a few features that are limited to pro users but I haven't seen any serious missing features that felt like they hobble the program.

Does it require an Internet connection?

No -- I've even blocked the program with FAB from accessing the internet the entire time I've been using it and so far no serious issues. It hobbles some of the lookup and advanced research features, but it's useful if you want to do research in a secure environment. Or if you don't want to interact with Google Scholar.

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Other notes

• Keywords - One thing I've been looking to solve for a while now is auto-tagging documents and grabbing those keywords for my own use. Qiqqa will do some tags and has a BibTec import capability, which does require the internet.
• OCR - will rescan all your documents, which is nice if they included text inside of images. I'm not sure if it saves the OCR or other info to the original file or a separate one. An initial import of many thousands of documents can take a long time to run so you might want to set this up overnight.
• Multi search – includes color highlights like with PDF XChange
• Lucene search tools - which lets you do similarity and proximity searches
• Annotations – can get exported as a report, which is very nice

Wishlist

• Portability - Of course this is something we'd ask for but this program in particular needs the ability to support multiple instances. This can help cover multiple research topics on one computer, which I don't think tagging can manage. After all, not everyone is doing all their research on one topic with one taxonomy.
• Undo button (e.g. CTRL+Z) when you make a change to a document
• Find hotkey (e.g. CTRL+F) when you want to search inside a PDF file.
• Would be interested in ways to integrate this with really any Google Scholar alternative https://www.makeuseof.com/google-scholar-alternatives/

Update here: recent additions to the excellent calibre program that include advanced, indexing search may mean that it's in some ways better than Qiqqa for searching. Mostly around how it manages multiple file formats rather than just PDF.

As of this writing, Qiqqa is no longer available for download.
But https://github.com/jimmejardine/qiqqa-o ... e/releases has an older version ( Oct. 4, 2019).

juverax wrote: ↑Fri Aug 05, 2022 3:40 am As of this writing, Qiqqa is no longer available for download.
But https://github.com/jimmejardine/qiqqa-o ... e/releases has an old version ( Oct. 4, 2019).

Good to know, thanks for that. I wonder if it's not just a webdev issue as it doesn't look like they're discontinuing the program.

Hi,
any idea if Qiqqa is back online? I used it a lot 5 years ago, I need it now. It is a great OCR and pdf organizer application.
I am getting either error 404 or 405.
or
There was a problem logging in: {"readyState":0,"status":0,"statusText":"error"}

... Here is what I just found about Qijja:
https://www.opensourceagenda.com/projec ... pen-source

and in the page there is a link to a fork (of Qijja) on github:
https://github.com/GerHobbelt/qiqqa-ope ... e/releases
with a download link to a v.82.xxx version released on Oct 21, 2020.

edlu wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 7:54 pm any idea if Qiqqa is back online?

I don't have a way of testing this as I do everything in Qiqqa in an offline, no-account status.

juverax wrote: ↑Tue Aug 16, 2022 7:19 pm ... Here is what I just found about Qijja:
https://www.opensourceagenda.com/projec ... pen-source

Thanks for the update. I'm glad they didn't shut the project down as I've grown reliant on the project for a lot of my professional work. Clearly I need to make a donation.