Searching Contents, not Metadata?

[MarjaE]

Is there any way to search the contents of files in Calibre? (Aside from leaving Calibre and using operating system search tools?) I tried looking this up in the help page, and ended up with a lot about tables of contents.

[eschwartz]

No, calibre has no indexing support.

Although there is the linux-only Recoll plugin (unmaintained).

...

I believe some people convert to TXT and use Windows' builtin search, which is better than trying to search through an AZW3 which Windows doesn't support.
Although there is probably an EPUB ifilter somewhere.

Unfortunately, none of that will help you search from within calibre.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by MarjaE

Is there any way to search the contents of files in Calibre? (Aside from leaving Calibre and using operating system search tools?) I tried looking this up in the help page, and ended up with a lot about tables of contents.

In Windows, and if you're prepared to carry the overhead of an extra format (e.g. as eschwartz suggests - TXT) then a combination of an OS level search tool and the Drop Search Results (DSR) plugin is a pretty good option.

I mainly use X1 Search for content searching, but I have also used/tested Agent Ransack, File Locator Pro, the Find feature of zabkat's xplorer², nirsoft's Search My Files, and of course Windows Search in conjunction with DSR - and they all work.

I like the notion of being able to use a different search tools

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Although there is probably an EPUB ifilter somewhere.

I wish someone would tell us where it is then, I've searched high and low for it over several years -so far no luck.

I can coerce X1 into looking inside epubs, but it's 'ugly' and practically impossible to get it to interop with DSR.

BR

[DaltonST]

The Multi-Column Search plug-in has full-text search functionality for those who want to stay within Calibre. It treats a .txt format of a book as a "virtual column". You have to do a 1-time conversion of your epubs to .txt, of course. It also has word-index search capabilities.

[readx]

Wouldn't "Quality Check" - "Search epubs" work? At least for epubs

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by readx

Wouldn't "Quality Check" - "Search epubs" work? At least for epubs

@readx - QC is slow if you search many books. I can do a search across 130,000+ 'books' with X1 in a couple of seconds. With QC it could take days or maybe forever. Advanced search tools, such as X1, Windows Search and File Locator Pro, maintain search indexes dynamically; and they are not limited to what's in calibre libraries.

BR

[MarjaE]

Most of my reference books are scanned pdfs or scanned djvus. I prefer epubs, but can't get readable epubs.