Does Calibre support Full Text Indexing / Search?

Question

Calibre has tons of plugins, but what I really miss is full text search for all my books (mainly pdf and DJVU). Is this implemented, is there a plugin available? I can only find feature requests that are years old and unfixed launchpad bugs. If full text search is not available, are there any alternatives that do provide this?

Thank you for your help,

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Answer 1

Unfortunately Calibre does not have full-fext (Context) search for now. It's on the TODO list, but it will be a while before it is implemented (it's rather low down on that list).

As for me in addition to Calibre you can use DocFetcher for Full Text (context) Search in Calibre's Library folder. It is working as axpected on Windows for me.

Answer 2

There is a plug-in to calibre for this: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=211137

It works, if you follow the instructions.

Steps to get this plugin working:

1. install thins plugin as a usual on in calibre
2. make a new custom column in calibre
   1. Go to Preferencies - add you own columns
   2. create a new column with:
      1. Lookup name: cid
      2. Column heading: CID
      3. Column type: Column built from other columns
      4. Template: {id}
      5. Sort/Search column by: number
3. install recoll on you system if you haven't done it already, with apt-get install recoll. Optionally you might want to use the backports source to keep the recoll up-to-date.
4. copy the directory "recollFullTextSearchPlugin" from the zip file to the calibre config plugins directory ($HOME/.config/calibre/plugins)
5. When you start calibre, a new icon for the plugin can be seen in the panel
6. before use the the plugin for the first time, make sure the paths for the plugin are set right, in particular:
   1. Path to recoll bin directory: /usr/bin
7. Make create a database for recoll using the button in the plugin (can take a lot of time for the first time)
8. Thats it

It works for me on Linux Mint 15 Nadya (based on Ubuntu 13.04), as long as your query do not produce too much books (>500 or so). Otherwise you get the maximum recurssion depth exceeded error.

Answer 3

Try Recoll. It's listed in Synaptic

Another possibility based on same xapian engine is Pinot which offers automatic folder monitoring (indexing), unlike Recoll manual re-indexing

Both index (and offer full-text search) PDF and DjVu if pdftotext and djvutext are found on system

Answer 4

Calibre version 6 has integrated full text search. works like a dream