We’re very pleased to announce that Mendeley Desktop 1.12 is now available, and will appearing as an auto-update for all users over the next couple of days. This release resolves two popular user requests, as well as numerous bug fixes.
Print PDFs from Mendeley Desktop
Printing has been our #2 user request for some time (second to an Android app, which is currently in progress), so it’s great to be able to deliver. To print a PDF, simply open it in a Mendeley reader tab, select the “File” menu at the top, and click “Print…” or press CTRL+P (CMD+P on MacOS).
From there, you have some standard print options, and the option to include or exclude your annotations. When you include annotations, sticky notes will have a marker to the side of the document, with the full note text appended to the end of the document, in the same format that our “Export PDF with annotations” feature uses currently.
Mark as read
Automatically marking documents as read was previously quite aggressive in Mendeley Desktop. If you opened a PDF in a tab, it was marked as read instantly. This meant that it wasn’t a very accurate indicator of whether a document had actually been “read” or not, only opened. We had a lot of feedback related to this, and have redesigned this system in an attempt to make it a little bit smarter.
Now the document is only marked as read once it has been scrolled most of the way through and has been opened for a reasonable period of time, dependent on the length of the document. Without interfacing with your brain, we can’t actually check whether you’ve read a document or not, so in the case where this doesn’t quite catch something, you can still change the read/unread status of a document manually by toggling the read/unread dot.
With this change made, we feel comfortable adding read/unread support to our Mobile and web applications in the near future also.
What’s next?
The majority of our time recently has been spent supporting a company-wide migration away from numerous private APIs and services, to having all our apps communicate and sync using our new public API (currently in beta). This is an absolutely huge piece of work, but when it’s done and stabilised, will result in a much faster and more stable base for us to iterate on and bring you value faster. We are expecting to start rolling out this new version around September/October.
Before then though, we’ll be doing a small release with some fixes to the citation plugins, and the ability to import MEDLINE files from PubMed. This has been another long-standing request for people who need to do systematic literature reviews across hundreds or even thousands of PubMed articles at a time.
If you’re interested in helping us test new features, you can opt-in to experimental releases via the “Help” menu in Mendeley Desktop. (you can opt out at any time to return to the last stable release). Please report any issues you find to support@mendeley.com
Thanks a lot.
Mendeley Blog 
First, thanks for allowing the print function. It was and is greatly needed.
Sorry to rain on the latest accomplishment, but I highlight things for a reason. Why did you not allow me to print what I had highlighted?
Please do not make us wait too long for that function.
Thanks very much for the continued improvements. I echo what Steve says above. It would be great to select whether or not the print copy maintains any highlights. Anyway, please keep us the good work. I can’t imagine doing my job without Mendeley.
Hey guys, thanks for the feedback. Highlights do print if you check the “Print annotations” checkbox on the print options dialog, and a quality colour printer should print these, this isn’t something we’d intentionally ‘forget’ 🙂 The problem is that yellow, particularly light shades of it like Mendeley Desktop currently uses for highlights, can be problematic for some printers, so depending on your printer they may not be very visible. We could spend time resolving this specific case, but we’d rather put that time into allowing custom annotation colours to be used, which could help fix this *and* help a lot of other users and use cases.
You can try highlighting the same passage 3 or 4 times (which will darken the colour) and do a test print, to see if this is in fact the problem. What we send to the printer is the same as what you see when you “Export PDF with annotations” from the file menu though.
Hope this helps. Thanks 🙂
Does this fix the 429 Activex issue.
@Krish: It doesn’t, but we’re looking into it at the moment.
Hey Steve, thank you for sharing this informational post. I have recently joined the MAC group; can’t wait to have Mendeley desktop.
Thanks for the update. Are you planning an app for BlackBerry 10? It will be interesting.
Regards.
The “print” feature doesn’t give users access to common printing options like changing the page layout (I almost always print 2 pages to 1 sheet of paper), black/white, double-sided, etc. On Mac OSX this seems to be pretty standard across applications–I’ve never run into this problem before–and it seems like OSX must provide a standard “print API” or something (I imagine Windows does too). I’m just wondering why you guys left this functionality out? Are there plans to add it?