search the contents of pdf files in my pc like google books

[ZahraB]

Hello dear friends!

I'm new here and very pleased to be among you.

I hope that you'll help me with my problem.

I have numerous PDF files stored in my PC and want to search through them just as you do in Google Books.
I have tried a few softwares but no good news in using them.

Please, help me with your suggestions!
Can Calibre solve my problem? If yes, how?
If no, then please advise me!

Thank you all in advance.
I hope the best of all for you.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ZahraB

I have numerous PDF files stored in my PC and want to search through them just as you do in Google Books.
Can Calibre solve my problem? If yes, how?
If no, then please advise me!

@ZahraB - a lot of things referred to as search tools operate on the file system data (file name, dates etc) or the file metadata (title, author, publisher, artist, etc). I'm assuming you want something that searches the actual text inside the PDF.

Whilst calibre has some content search facilities here and there, IMO they are not very useful, some are too slow others too restrictive.

If you're running Windows you can use Windows Search from Windows/File Explorer. You may need to configure and start the Indexing service from Control Panel (once only).

I use Windows Search on a library of a 100,000+ books (50% PDFs). Search time is typically 2-5 seconds.

Assuming the PDF's are in a calibre library there's a calibre plugin - Drop Search Results (DSR) - which can be used to integrate most Windows Search tools with calibre. Its disarmingly simple in concept and to use.

Windows search tools produce a list of files that meet the search criteria, if a list from a search on a calibre library is drag/dropped into the DSR dropzone the corresponding books are marked in the calibre library, from there it's very easy to put the marked books into a reading list, tag them, send them to your device etc.

If your running OSX you can use its Spotlight content search facility for PDFs. I'm not aware of any integration of Spotlight with Calibre such as DSR.

If your running a Linux variant, the distro probably includes some content search utilities that can handle PDF. There's a calibre plugin for the Recoll content search tool, but I am not sure of its status - i.e. whether it works, I have a suspicion it stopped working a while ago.

BR

[dwig]

It should be noted that as good as they are, none of these search tools incorporate their own OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functions. When searching in formats like PDF, they can't "read' words that exist only as pictures, the most common contents of PDFs made by scanning printed materials, nor can they "read" words that are actually vector art (e.g. "text" in files saved from Illustrator, et. al., after the text has been converted to outlines/paths.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by dwig

It should be noted that as good as they are, none of these search tools incorporate their own OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functions.

Not necessarily true - Windows Search is extensible with 3rd party IFilters

FX : ABBYY OCR IFilter and that's not the only OCR enabled PDF IFilter. I'm unsure if it's packaged in Fine Reader, can't see why not - apart from marketing.

Recent MS PDF IFilters may have it too, given that OneNote does a rather good job of doing OCR on images.

OCR enabled IFilters will use a lot of processor time when they index an image PDF, but that only happens once per PDF. And Windows Search Indexing is normally set so that it only executes when there's nothing else wanting the CPU - you have to go out of your way to make it otherwise.

OCR enabled IFilters will inherit the well know problems of OCR in general, but not all image PDFs originate from scans of 16th century Blackletter on vellum

And I wouldn't be at all surprised if Spotlight didn't have OCR enabled PDF search.

BR