Cookbook

Short answers to "how do I ...?". Each recipe gives the commands, what to know about them, and links to the tutorial chapter that shows them running and to the guide that covers every detail. Every mosaic command on these pages is checked against the command line by the test suite (docs/scripts/check_doc_commands.py).

Area	Recipes
Searching	a topic everywhere, one database, titles or abstracts, years, authors, journals, open access, most cited, a source's own syntax, a silent source, your cache, keys, noisy sources, your own JSON API
Downloading	the Unpaywall e-mail, a search's PDFs, one DOI, a BibTeX or CSV file, a folder per project, file names, PDF links only, files that are not PDFs, publishers that answer 403
Paywalled papers	an Elsevier paper, a reference list through your browser, the Downloads folder, PDFs you already have, PDFs without a DOI, replacing a file, publisher logins, CAPTCHAs, sessions
Exporting	BibTeX, RIS, several formats, a spreadsheet, one citation, the whole cache, Obsidian, Zotero, NotebookLM
Keeping up	saved searches, a morning cron job, JSON for notifications, related papers
Models and analysis	a local or cloud model, timeouts, relevance ranking, summaries, comparison tables, embeddings, search by meaning, questions, conversations, full text, the citation network
Scripts and agents	JSON for jq, DOI lists, the JSON document, the Claude Code skill, the web interface, exit codes
Maintenance	where files live, the cache, backups, a moved library, starting over, upgrades, completion