This is a demonstration project by Paul Gowder in conjunction with an article in the Northwestern Law Journal des Refusés criticizing the Bluebook regime of legal scholarship. Its purpose is to prove that we can fully automate citation information in electronic law review articles by embedding a computer-readable citation file into an article PDF. This works with any plain text citation format, which can be generated by, and read into, applications like Zotero (my personal favorite), EndNote, Papers, PaperPile, or many other options.
Please be aware that nothing is ever sent to any server with this application. It actually uses pure javascript in your web browser (that is, running on your computer) to embed and extract PDF data. Your privacy is completely protected. You can (probably) prove this to yourself by turning off your internet connection after this page has loaded and before you actually select your files. You can also look at the source code yourself.
Also, please be patient if this lags a bit. This sort of thing is pretty demanding on web browsers!
Waiting for user input...
Select a citation file in any plain text format (CSL JSON, RIS, BiTeX, etc.)
Select the PDF file to embed it into.
After selecting both files, your browser should prompt you to accept a download (or maybe just automatically do it). That download will be a PDF file with your data embedded. If this broke, hit reload to try again.
Just select a PDF file with citation metadata embedded by this application. Then say yes if your browser asks for permission to download a file. You'll get out the file that you (or someone else) put in via this application.