org-roam-bibtex VS pdf-tools

In addition to org-roam, I would recommend checking out https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex for attaching notes to specific papers that are indexed by an application like Zotero. Some good tutorials for it are here: https://rgoswami.me/posts/org-note-workflow/ and https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/how_to_take_smart_notes_org/ and https://emacsconf.org/2020/talks/17/ . Since current org-roam (post-v2) uses the normal org-mode "id" form, you can make any "headline" into an roam-registered node. You could then split your long derivations into different headlines, where the body of the headline or descriptive text could refer to prior nodes, but any latex is inserted using org latex blocks https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-LaTeX.html . You've maybe already considered this (and I wouldn't be surprised if local references were easier to do in straight latex), but org-roam-bibtex is really nice for interfacing with your citation system for other papers.

I think you should also look org-roam and org-roam-bibtex (I can't configure org-roam-bibtex properly because I'm on Windows).

Taking this one step further, if you use the excellent org-roam package (which if you don't you should definitely check it out, its great for note-taking), there is a package called org-roam-bibtex which communicates very well with the aforementioned packages. With it, you can create bibliographic notes as part of your org-roam repository from their bibtex entry and initialize the file to also include a link to the pdf from org-noter. Once you learn it, its a very powerful and streamlined workflow for working with articles which makes your life very easy. Its quite a bit of reading to do on your end on how to make all these work together, but trust me its worth it.

Have you followed the discussion here: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex/issues/159

If you want to use it primarily for literature notes, maybe you should have a look at the current state of https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex/tree/org-roam-v2 before deciding.

Also https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/706

;; Fix blurry PDFs on MacOS. ;; From https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/51 (setq pdf-view-use-scaling t)

First things first, install pdf-tools, a great Emacs package for viewing pdfs. The default pdf viewer Docview is very limited so you should definitely get this package.

nov.el is pretty nice, although pdf-tools makes PDFs tolerable.

It looks enjoy pdf-tools got a new maintainer and he already changed the the melpa ⠀recipe, so you can get it via the package manager. I think this is a good development. My impression is, that he is new as an Emacs package maintainer, so please be kind and supportive, so he will stay on it for a while. :)

I have been using emacs pdf-tools lately and really enjoying it https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools

View, annotate PDFs and more with Emac's pdf-tools. There is also the built-in doc-view.

[pdf-tools](https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools) will let you do that.

I tried setting (add-hook 'pdf-view-mode-hook (lambda() (linum-mode -1))), which I found here. But it doesn't seem to do anything.

doc-view.el aside, there's https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools which may have its own set of issues.