I am not a big fan of pdfs, but more and more I find myself collecting and reading from them. What has changed for me is the availability through my university library of a wide range of research journals in this format. Even when I have the journal in my office, I often download the pdf so that I can review specific research articles on my computer while I am writing.
If you are a Mac user (10.4 or later), there is a great product for organizing and searching your pdf collection. The product is called YEP (no idea what the name means).
YEP is a document management system. The program stores what you import as individual files within a YEP folder in your “Documents” folder, but allows you to tag files and to search in multiple ways. An interesting suggestion was to use the print to pdf option to save many categories of material. For example, anything that can be printed from a web browser can be saved to this document management system.
The present version of YEP is free, but the developers say that further versions will cost a small amount to support their development efforts.
