Need to find a recipe in my cookbooks (mobi, epub, pdf)

[reddevilchild]

Hi,

I am trying to find specific recipe's in my various format cookbooks (not just the tag's) but need a search tool that can look inside all of the various formats at the same time. For example, I want to find all the recipe's that exist in my library for banana bread in 1 search.

I downloaded the plug in "[GUI Plugin] Quality Check" which is great for epub as it has a feature called "Search epub's", however as it obviously states it does not check for my search term in the other formats.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Adoby]

One "brute force" method could be to convert all books to txt and use grep or some other tool to search.

[reddevilchild]

I know... It seems like this would be such an easy and common place type of search without having to do this giant library conversion.

[speakingtohe]

The quality check plugin can search epubs. If your books are mobi or pdf would probably not take that long to convert to epub. Anyway works for me usually within seconds

Helen

[BetterRed]

@reddevilchild

If you are using Linux you could install the Recoll full text indexer/searcher, there's even a Calibre integration plugin available, Recoll indexes PDF's and ePubs, not sure about mobi.

If you are using OS/X you could use Spotlight to index and search the library, again I'm pretty certain it indexes PDF's and ePubs and I'm not sure about mobi - AFAIK there's no Calibre integration PI for Spotlight.

If you are using Window's you could use its indexing and search, but it only indexes PDF's not ePub or mobi. I convert epubs (I don't keep mobi's) to RTF and then to DOCX (much smaller) rather than text, as its more likely to preserve formatting. When needed I integrate WDS search results into Calibre via a couple of Notepad++ macros and the Import List plugin.

For all three I recommend restricting the search to the library folder

Using Recoll or WDS I can search a 15GB 30,000 book library in < 10secs, colleagues on Macs get similar performance from Spotlight on a near identical library.

BR

[Sabardeyn]

What BetterRed suggested is the only little or no effort on your part approach I know of for Windows.

As for calibre... only thing I can suggest is that you copy & paste a list of recipes from each book into the Comments field (alternately: create a custom field). In this way you can use calibre's existing search (ex, comments:"=vegetarian chili") to find possible recipes. You would have to view each possibility individually to confirm which exact recipe you wanted, but this would cut down on the amount of work you would have to do.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Sabardeyn

What BetterRed suggested is the only little or no effort on your part approach I know of for Windows.

As for calibre... only thing I can suggest is that you copy & paste a list of recipes from each book into the Comments field (alternately: create a custom field). In this way you can use calibre's existing search (ex, comments:"=vegetarian chili") to find possible recipes. You would have to view each possibility individually to confirm which exact recipe you wanted, but this would cut down on the amount of work you would have to do.

@Saberdeyn -Its not a 'no effort' approach, reddevilchild would have to convert all their epub & mobi cookbooks to rtf. And then if they wanted to get rid of the bloat they'd have to convert the RTF's to DOCX. DOCX are up to 90% smaller, i.e. a 90MB RTF will often convert to a 10MB DOCX.

If some bright spark wrote a donate ware iFilter for epub I would gladly make a contribution - shouldn't be too hard, iFilters exist for ZIP, HTML, and XML and there's even one for CHM. Most of the iFilters I use come from 3rd parties.

BR

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by reddevilchild

Hi,

I am trying to find specific recipe's in my various format cookbooks (not just the tag's) but need a search tool that can look inside all of the various formats at the same time. For example, I want to find all the recipe's that exist in my library for banana bread in 1 search.

I downloaded the plug in "[GUI Plugin] Quality Check" which is great for epub as it has a feature called "Search epub's", however as it obviously states it does not check for my search term in the other formats.

Any help would be appreciated.

Probably stating something you already know, but if you convert all of your cookbooks to epub then except for scanned ones you can search them all. I know some will not convert that well, but should be good enough for the search to work and you can then view them in their original format.

BTW I never thought of searching my cookbook collection that way. A couple of recipes I know I have but can't remember what book they are in so thanks for that.

Helen

[Sabardeyn]

BR,
I could be mistaken, because I didn't use Win7 (pro? ultimate?) for long (6 months) before I fried my mobo. But I'm pretty sure that I had Windows indexing epubs as they represented the greater part of my library. However, as I recall, I had to manually add several file types to be indexed, possibly including epub.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Sabardeyn

BR,
I could be mistaken, because I didn't use Win7 (pro? ultimate?) for long (6 months) before I fried my mobo. But I'm pretty sure that I had Windows indexing epubs as they represented the greater part of my library. However, as I recall, I had to manually add several file types to be indexed, possibly including epub.

If you could search the contents of ePUBs you must have have installed an iFilter for epubs. Without an iFilter all that gets indexed are the file properties, name, size, file type, file create and modify dates etc, but not content. If you had such a thing can you remember where you got it, I've turned the planet inside-out & upside-down looking for one.

AFAIK the W8 & W7 indexers are the same, in W7 you can see what filters are installed via Nils Soper's SearchFilterView utility (see attachment), it probably works in W8 - I never tried it. Whatever you did on W7 should also be do-able on W8. I've tried a couple of kludges, but they resulted in corrupt indexes, meaning I had to reset the Indexing service and rebuild the indexes.

The main suppliers of iFilters that I'm aware of are iFiltershop and Citeknet, neither of them do an epub iFilter, or any other ebook formats. And I don't think MS even made one for LIT. The attitude seems to be - search is only needed by serious people, and serious people don't use ebook formats because there are no standards or conventions for annotations, citations etc. There's no shortage of PDF iFilters, MS, Adobe, Tracker, Foxit, Nitro... and similar all ship PDF iFilters.

An iFilter is a DLL that conforms to certain rules - its job is to extract the significant text from the file types it handles and pass that over to the service that maintains the index.

BR

[Sabardeyn]

No, I cannot recall exactly what I did to index epubs. My guess, and it really is just a guess, is that I handled it as an alternate extension for ZIP files. Only the text portions of the archive are relevant to Indexing, so ignoring the other stuff in an EPUB (ToC, Spine, OPF, etc) would be fine. Images might have been ignored as well, which wouldn't really mater as I wouldn't be searching on them anyway.

All that I am certain of is that I almost maxed out Indexing at 1.97 Gb after going through my entire library.


PS: If you can figure out how to generate an EPUB iFilter, it appears as though you might have a lucrative niche product, with a growing market, without any competitors in sight.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Sabardeyn

No, I cannot recall exactly what I did to index epubs. My guess, and it really is just a guess, is that I handled it as an alternate extension for ZIP files. Only the text portions of the archive are relevant to Indexing, so ignoring the other stuff in an EPUB (ToC, Spine, OPF, etc) would be fine. Images might have been ignored as well, which wouldn't really mater as I wouldn't be searching on them anyway.

I've tried do the same with the zip iFilter from the iFiltershop. In fact it still there see attachment, but all it does is to index contents of the zip in terms of file names, but not the contents thereof. Citeknet have an iFilter zip, I think I tried it with similar results - but it could be that there's another.

I know my library folders are being indexed because docx, rtf, pdf, chms etc show up in search, and its that list of file paths that I massage with notepad++ macros to create a csv that I give to the ImportList PI to create a Reading List.

I just found this http://www.sigmasd.com/product/Zip-IFilter/322038.

It refers to the IFiltershop product. Sigma appears to be a UK based systems integrator - I'll send them a mail and ask how to make it work for zips dressed up as ePUBs. But I wont hold my breath expecting response.

Originally Posted by Sabardeyn

PS: If you can figure out how to generate an EPUB iFilter, it appears as though you might have a lucrative niche product, with a growing market, without any competitors in sight.

10-20 years ago I would have done it by now, but these days whilst the back brain knows what must done, the front brain says it has better things to do with its time, disk space is cheap, and not all PDFs can be readily converted to ePUB etc, etc. :lol:

What did you mean by 'I almost maxed out Indexing at 1.97 Gb after going through my entire library'? I didn't think there was a limit on its size other than available drive space. I index much more than what's in the calibre library folders.

BR

PS : thanks for your interest in this, it may lead to getting the zip Ifilter to do on epubs what sigma claims it can do on zips, then I might be tempted to clone the Recoll plugin for WDS.

[Sabardeyn]

[Cheeky & Vague mode: Engaged]

Hmmm... I think I was wrong. Well... actually, I was absolutely right, I think.

But still wrong.

Talking about the Gb limit jogged my memory and caused me to do a bit more rummaging in the gray cells. Which unearthed something I had forgotten -- a "prior step", if you will -- that may very well have changed the underlying operation. This would account for our current spate of "Yes you can!" vs "No you can't" conversational exchanges.

Since your questions have made me question my own memory, I'll do some research and get back to you.

Please wait patiently.
[Cheeky & Vague mode: Disengaged]
[Muzak mode: Engaged]
"The Girl from Ipanema, Instrumental" begins to play.

[BetterRed]

Hmmm, you've given me an inkling of what you might have done - I check it out later.

The gal from ipanema probably has a tear in her eye if she was anywhere near Barra da Tijuca beach on monday

thanks BR