Searching within books, is it possible

[NeHe]

Hi there. I am a new user, and have a Calibre library including several hundred pdfs of scanned books (textbooks from my University days and a large cookbook collection) converted to PDF and OCRed so they are indexed and individually searchable.

Is there a plugin or other companion app that would be able to search content within a book? So for example I could search for "banana bread" and find which cookbooks had a banana bread recipe in them.

There are desktop search tools (Recoll for example) that I could point at the library directory, but I was wondering if there is something more integrated that people have used?

Thanks.

--Neil.

[capink]

There is a plugin called Quality Check that allows you to search within books for words. You can search the whole library or narrow the scope to selected books only. It only works for books with epub format.

edit: there is an abandoned a recoll plugin that I never used and I don't think it works on recent calibre versions.

[JSWolf]

Quality Check will not search PDF. I think QC only is able to search ePub.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by NeHe

Hi there. I am a new user, and have a Calibre library including several hundred pdfs of scanned books (textbooks from my University days and a large cookbook collection) converted to PDF and OCRed so they are indexed and individually searchable.

Is there a plugin or other companion app that would be able to search content within a book? So for example I could search for "banana bread" and find which cookbooks had a banana bread recipe in them.

There are desktop search tools (Recoll for example) that I could point at the library directory, but I was wondering if there is something more integrated that people have used?

Thanks.

--Neil.

Sorry, there are no plugins that will search the text layer of PDF.

[ownedbycats]

If you can find an external program to search the PDFs (I use Agent Ransack, but it's a bit expensive), you can use the Drop Search Results plugin to drag and drop the results in and have them display in Calibre. It's not really the integrated solution you were looking for but it's the best we have for now.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

If you can find an external program to search the PDFs (I use Agent Ransack, but it's a bit expensive), you can use the Drop Search Results plugin to drag and drop the results in and have them display in Calibre. It's not really the integrated solution you were looking for but it's the best we have for now.

Agent Ransack/File Locator LITE is free, it's maybe good enough for some. AFAIK the MythicSoft products are only available for MS Windows.

But, IMO the Windows 10 Search feature is good enough for most people, especially if they use the Advanced Query Syntax

An ePub iFilter for Windows is available, there's a link in the Useful tools sticky in the Related Tools sub-forum.

Originally Posted by NeHe

Hi there. I am a new user, and have a Calibre library including several hundred pdfs of scanned books (textbooks from my University days and a large cookbook collection) converted to PDF and OCRed so they are indexed and individually searchable.

Is there a plugin or other companion app that would be able to search content within a book? So for example I could search for "banana bread" and find which cookbooks had a banana bread recipe in them.

There are desktop search tools (Recoll for example) that I could point at the library directory, but I was wondering if there is something more integrated that people have used?

Thanks.

--Neil.

Since you mention Recoll I assume you're using Linux

There is a Recoll plugin, see Index of plugins. But I'm pretty sure it only works on very old versions of calibre, and that the originator has abandoned it. You could modify it for your own use.

Or do as you suggest, use Recoll, or another Linux full text utilities directly. I'm not sure which Linux search utilities work with the Drop Search Results; have a look in the DSR thread.

Full text search is on Kovid's longer term to do list, he's mentioned using Lucene as the search engine.

BR

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Agent Ransack/File Locator LITE is free, it's maybe good enough for some. AFAIK the MythicSoft products are only available for MS Windows.

From what I recall epub/pdf searching is only available in the paid version.

[BetterRed]

Win 10 Search with the free ePub and PDF iFilters installed will search the content of ePubs and PDFs.

I'm not criticising Mythicsofts products, I've been using FileLocator Pro for years. But I find Windows 10 Search and AQS more than good enough for most searches, and for some searches better than File Locator… or X1. Its generally a tad faster, and it's free.

BR

[ownedbycats]

Personally I had way too many annoyances with the Windows search indexer (runaway CPU usage! even after rebuilding the index and restarting the service!) that I just disabled it entirely. I use Everything + Agent Ransack most of the time these days. Sometimes NirSoft's SearchMyFiles.

[BetterRed]

Yeah, I had those problems on XP and to a lesser extent on Win 7, that's why I have File Locator Pro and X1. But I've not had them on Win 10, maybe because I only index my data drives and not my system drive. To search for folders and files based on their names I use the xplorer² (file manager) Find tool.

Oh, and I do content searches from File Explorer or xplorer² - not the Winkey+S applet.

BR