Yep icon

Fast Start

Go through these four steps to familarize yourself with Yep - but by all means please read the full manual.

Step 1: Where do you want Yep to track documents?

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Yep will by default scan your entire hard drive for PDFs. Use the prefs to change which folders Yep will find PDFs in.

Open the Preferences, and select which folders on your hard drives that Yep should scan.

The advanced settings allows you to add other external hard drives, disk images, network drives, etc.

Please see the manual for details on using Yep accross a network.


Step 2: Tagging documents (tags are also known as keywords)

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With Yep, you can keep track of those hundreds or thousands of research papers that are on your hard drive. With Yep, you are not restricted to one organizational paradigm. Manage and sort your PDFs as you see fit.

In order to add tags to a document, simply click on it then type the tags in the details panel on the right.

To add the same tag to many documents, select all the documents you want to tag, using the mouse or the Select All command from the menus, then enter the tag.

Check out Yep's Auto tagging feature, available in the details panel under the tag entry area. The Options button allows you to fine tune how Yep will look for tags inside the document.


Step 3: The Controls at the top of the window

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Just click through them from left to right to get a feel for what they do.

Back, Forward and Home - Similar to the same controls on a Web Browser - they take you back through your search history in Yep.

'Tag' - this panel shows all the tags for all the documents that you are currently showing in Yep. There is a button at the bottom of the tags that allows you to treat folder names as tags. When on, in addition to all the tags you have entered, Yep creates a dynamic set of tags that represents the folders that your PDFs are in.

'Collections' - this panel shows all your saved searches. When you do a search in Yep that you want to save, it is stored in the Collections.

'Tracking' - this panel gives you a view of your PDFs much like the Finder would - except folders with no PDFs do not show up, simplifying your view. You can also use this panel to move PDFs - simply drag a PDF into a folder to move it there. If you hold down the option key when dragging, the PDF will be copied to the new location.

Icon and List view - You can view your PDFs as icons, or switch over to list view for more detail. In list view, you can choose which columns should show by using the View menu.


Step 4: Searching

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The search window is on the upper left. Simply enter text into to start a search.

By default, Yep searchs the content, tags, notes, and title of documents.

You can tell Yep to only search title by turning off both metadata (tags, notes etc) and Spotlight content searching. See the menu in the left side of the search field.

If you have a folder called 'downloads' on your computer and want to search inside of that, simply select it in the Tracking tab, then enter your search.

You can save a search, it will be stored in the 'Collections' panel.

If you just type one letter, Yep only shows documents that start with that letter.