Academic workflow with old PDFs

[Alessandro Bertulli]

Hi all!

I reckon this message may start a flame but that's not my intention, I'm
looking to hear your advice (especially, but not limited, if you work
in/with academia)

I'm currently writing my MS's thesis. Searching for the state of the art
of my assigned technology, I am struggling to read and reason about some
old papers from ACM and IEEE (pre-2000, scanned, with no index). I am
currently switching back and forth between Sioyek and Evince to read my
pdfs, while taking notes in Org mode.

I wonder wether I should switch to using pdf-tools (potentially with the
integration of org-noter). So, my point is: can pdf-tools, in your
opinion, work with old pdf files, or it's just a limitation of the file
type? If you know Sioyek, how do you integrate it with Emacs? Is it
worth doing so? Or Sioyek is clearly better/worse than Emacs *for an
academic workflow*? Would you suggest something like Logseq?

P.S. note: Sioyek aims to reconstruct hyperlinks to references and
equations in text even for old papers. That's awesome and very useful,
but unfortunately it seems to depend on the quality of the file, as
sometimes it doesn't work. Here my need for a replacement.

Thanks!

Bertulli