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Chapter 5. Installation and configuration

5.1. Installing a binary copy

   There are three types of binary Recoll installations:

     o Through your system normal software distribution framework (ie,

       Debian/Ubuntu apt, FreeBSD ports, etc.).

     o From a package downloaded from the Recoll web site.

     o From a prebuilt tree downloaded from the Recoll web site.

   In all cases, the strict software dependancies (ie on Xapian or iconv)

   will be automatically satisfied, you should not have to worry about them.

   You will only have to check or install supporting applications for the

   file types that you want to index beyond those that are natively processed

   by Recoll (text, HTML, email files, and a few others).

   You should also maybe have a look at the configuration section (but this

   may not be necessary for a quick test with default parameters). Most

   parameters can be more conveniently set from the GUI interface.

  5.1.1. Installing through a package system

   If you use a BSD-type port system or a prebuilt package (DEB, RPM,

   manually or through the system software configuration utility), just

   follow the usual procedure for your system.

  5.1.2. Installing a prebuilt Recoll

   The unpackaged binary versions on the Recoll web site are just compressed

   tar files of a build tree, where only the useful parts were kept

   (executables and sample configuration).

   The executable binary files are built with a static link to libxapian and

   libiconv, to make installation easier (no dependencies).

   After extracting the tar file, you can proceed with installation as if you

   had built the package from source (that is, just type make install). The

   binary trees are built for installation to /usr/local.

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5.2. Supporting packages

   Recoll uses external applications to index some file types. You need to

   install them for the file types that you wish to have indexed (these are

   run-time optional dependencies. None is needed for building or running

   Recoll except for indexing their specific file type).

   After an indexing pass, the commands that were found missing can be

   displayed from the recoll File menu. The list is stored in the missing

   text file inside the configuration directory.

   A list of common file types which need external commands follows. Many of

   the filters need the iconv command, which is not always listed as a

   dependancy.

   Please note that, due to the relatively dynamic nature of this

   information, the most up to date version is now kept on the Recoll helper

   applications page along with links to the home pages or best

   source/patches pages, and misc tips. The list below is not updated often

   and may be quite stale.

   For many Linux distributions, most of the commands listed can be installed

   from the package repositories. However, the packages are sometimes

   outdated, or not the best version for Recoll, so you should take a look at

   the Recoll helper applications page if a file type is important to you.

   As of Recoll release 1.14, a number of XML-based formats that were handled

   by ad hoc filter code now use the xsltproc command, which usually comes

   with libxslt. These are: abiword, fb2 (ebooks), kword, openoffice, svg.

   Now for the list:

     o Openoffice files need unzip and xsltproc.

     o PDF files need pdftotext which is part of the Xpdf or Poppler

       packages.

     o Postscript files need pstotext. The original version has an issue with

       shell character in file names, which is corrected in recent packages.

       See the the Recoll helper applications page for more detail.

     o MS Word needs antiword. It is also useful to have wvWare installed as

       it may be be used as a fallback for some files which antiword does not

       handle.

     o MS Excel and PowerPoint need catdoc.

     o MS Open XML (docx) needs xsltproc.

     o Wordperfect files need wpd2html from the libwpd (or libwpd-tools on

       Ubuntu) package.

     o RTF files need unrtf, which, in its standard version, has much trouble

       with non-western character sets. Check the Recoll helper applications

       page.

     o TeX files need untex or detex. Check the Recoll helper applications

       page for sources if it's not packaged for your distribution.

     o dvi files need dvips.

     o djvu files need djvutxt and djvused from the DjVuLibre package.

     o Audio files: Recoll releases before 1.13 used the id3info command from

       the id3lib package to extract mp3 tag information, metaflac (standard

       flac tools) for flac files, and ogginfo (vorbis tools) for ogg files.

       Releases 1.14 and later use a single Python filter based on mutagen

       for all audio file types.

     o Pictures: Recoll uses the Exiftool Perl package to extract tag

       information. Most image file formats are supported. Note that there

       may not be much interest in indexing the technical tags (image size,

       aperture, etc.). This is only of interest if you store personal tags

       or textual descriptions inside the image files.

     o chm: files in microsoft help format need Python and the pychm module

       (which needs chmlib).

     o ICS: up to Recoll 1.13, iCalendar files need Python and the icalendar

       module. icalendar is not needed for newer versions, which use internal

       code.

     o Zip archives need Python (and the standard zipfile module).

     o Rar archives need Python, the rarfile Python module and the unrar

       utility.

     o Midi karaoke files need Python and the Midi module

     o Konqueror webarchive format with Python (uses the Tarfile module).

     o mimehtml web archive format (support based on the email filter, which

       introduces some mild weirdness, but still usable).

   Text, HTML, email folders, and Scribus files are processed internally. Lyx

   is used to index Lyx files. Many filters need iconv and the standard sed

   and awk.

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5.3. Building from source

  5.3.1. Prerequisites

   C++ compiler. Up to Recoll version 1.13.04, its absence can manifest

   itself by strange messages about a missing iconv_open.

   Development files for Xapian core.

  Important

   If you are building Xapian for an older CPU (before Pentium 4 or Athlon

   64), you need to add the --disable-sse flag to the configure command. Else

   all Xapian application will crash with an illegal instruction error.

   Development files for Qt .

   Development files for X11 and zlib.

   Check the Recoll download page for up to date version information.

   You will most probably be able to find a binary package for Qt for your

   system. You may have to compile Xapian but this is not difficult (if you

   are using FreeBSD, there is a port).

   You may also need libiconv. Recoll currently uses version 1.9 (this should

   not be critical). On Linux systems, the iconv interface is part of libc

   and you should not need to do anything special.

  5.3.2. Building

   Recoll has been built on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris, most

   versions after 2005 should be ok, maybe some older ones too (Solaris 8 is

   ok). If you build on another system, and need to modify things, I would

   very much welcome patches.

   Depending on the Qt 3 configuration on your system, you may have to set

   the QTDIR and QMAKESPECS variables in your environment:

     o QTDIR should point to the directory above the one that holds the qt

       include files (ie: if qt.h is /usr/local/qt/include/qt.h, QTDIR should

       be /usr/local/qt).

     o QMAKESPECS should be set to the name of one of the Qt mkspecs

       sub-directories (ie: linux-g++).

   On many Linux systems, QTDIR is set by the login scripts, and QMAKESPECS

   is not needed because there is a default link in mkspecs/.

   Neither QTDIR nor QMAKESPECS should be needed with Qt 4, configuration

   details are entirely determined by qmake (which is quite often installed

   as qmake-qt4).

   Configure options: 

     o --without-aspell will disable the code for phonetic matching of search

       terms.

     o --with-fam or --with-inotify will enable the code for real time

       indexing. Inotify support is enabled by default on recent Linux

       systems.

     o --disable-webkit is available from version 1.17 to implement the

       result list with a Qt QTextBrowser instead of a WebKit widget if you

       do not or can't depend on the latter.

     o --enable-xattr will enable code to fetch data from file extended

       attributes. This is only useful is some application stores data in

       there, and also needs some simple configuration (see comments in the

       fields configuration file).

     o --enable-camelcase will enable splitting camelCase words. This is not

       enabled by default as it has the unfortunate side-effect of making

       some phrase searches quite confusing: ie, "MySQL manual" would be

       matched by "MySQL manual" and "my sql manual" but not "mysql manual"

       (only inside phrase searches).

     o --with-file-command Specify the version of the 'file' command to use

       (ie: --with-file-command=/usr/local/bin/file). Can be useful to enable

       the gnu version on systems where the native one is bad.

     o --disable-qtgui Disable the Qt interface. Will allow building the

       indexer and the command line search program in absence of a Qt

       environment.

     o --disable-x11mon Disable X11 connection monitoring inside recollindex.

       Together with --disable-qtgui, this allows building recoll without Qt

       and X11.

     o Of course the usual autoconf configure options, like --prefix apply.

   Normal procedure:

         cd recoll-xxx

         configure

         make

         (practices usual hardship-repelling invocations)

   There is little auto-configuration. The configure script will mainly link

   one of the system-specific files in the mk directory to mk/sysconf. If

   your system is not known yet, it will tell you as much, and you may want

   to manually copy and modify one of the existing files (the new file name

   should be the output of uname -s).

  5.3.3. Installation

   Either type make install or execute recollinstall prefix, in the root of

   the source tree. This will copy the commands to prefix/bin and the sample

   configuration files, scripts and other shared data to prefix/share/recoll.

   If the installation prefix given to recollinstall is different from either

   the system default or the value which was specified when executing

   configure (as in configure --prefix /some/path), you will have to set the

   RECOLL_DATADIR environment variable to indicate where the shared data is

   to be found (ie for (ba)sh: export

   RECOLL_DATADIR=/some/path/share/recoll).

   You can then proceed to configuration.

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5.4. Configuration overview

   Most of the parameters specific to the recoll GUI are set through the

   Preferences menu and stored in the standard Qt place

   ($HOME/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf). You probably do not want to edit

   this by hand.

   Recoll indexing options are set inside text configuration files located in

   a configuration directory. There can be several such directories, each of

   which define the parameters for one index.

   The configuration files can be edited by hand or through the Index

   configuration dialog (Preferences menu). The GUI tool will try to respect

   your formatting and comments as much as possible, so it is quite possible

   to use both ways.

   The most accurate documentation for the configuration parameters is given

   by comments inside the default files, and we will just give a general

   overview here.

   For each index, there are two sets of configuration files. System-wide

   configuration files are kept in a directory named like

   /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples, and define default values, shared by

   all indexes. For each index, a parallel set of files defines the

   customized parameters.

   The default location of the configuration is the .recoll directory in your

   home. Most people will only use this directory.

   This location can be changed, or others can be added with the

   RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option parameter to recoll

   and recollindex.

   If the .recoll directory does not exist when recoll or recollindex are

   started, it will be created with a set of empty configuration files.

   recoll will give you a chance to edit the configuration file before

   starting indexing. recollindex will proceed immediately. To avoid

   mistakes, the automatic directory creation will only occur for the default

   location, not if -c or RECOLL_CONFDIR were used (in the latter cases, you

   will have to create the directory).

   All configuration files share the same format. For example, a short

   extract of the main configuration file might look as follows:

         # Space-separated list of directories to index.

         topdirs =  ~/docs /usr/share/doc

         [~/somedirectory-with-utf8-txt-files]

         defaultcharset = utf-8

   There are three kinds of lines:

     o Comment (starts with #) or empty.

     o Parameter affectation (name = value).

     o Section definition ([somedirname]).

   Depending on the type of configuration file, section definitions either

   separate groups of parameters or allow redefining some parameters for a

   directory sub-tree. They stay in effect until another section definition,

   or the end of file, is encountered. Some of the parameters used for

   indexing are looked up hierarchically from the current directory location

   upwards. Not all parameters can be meaningfully redefined, this is

   specified for each in the next section.

   When found at the beginning of a file path, the tilde character (~) is

   expanded to the name of the user's home directory, as a shell would do.

   White space is used for separation inside lists. List elements with

   embedded spaces can be quoted using double-quotes.

   Encoding issues. Most of the configuration parameters are plain ASCII. Two

   particular sets of values may cause encoding issues:

     o File path parameters may contain non-ascii characters and should use

       the exact same byte values as found in the file system directory.

       Usually, this means that the configuration file should use the system

       default locale encoding.

     o The unac_except_trans parameter should be encoded in UTF-8. If your

       system locale is not UTF-8, and you need to also specify non-ascii

       file paths, this poses a difficulty because common text editors cannot

       handle multiple encodings in a single file. In this relatively

       unlikely case, you can edit the configuration file as two separate

       text files with appropriate encodings, and concatenate them to create

       the complete configuration.

  5.4.1. Main configuration file

   recoll.conf is the main configuration file. It defines things like what to

   index (top directories and things to ignore), and the default character

   set to use for document types which do not specify it internally.

   The default configuration will index your home directory. If this is not

   appropriate, start recoll to create a blank configuration, click Cancel,

   and edit the configuration file before restarting the command. This will

   start the initial indexing, which may take some time.

   Most of the following parameters can be changed from the Index

   Configuration menu in the recoll interface. Some can only be set by

   editing the configuration file.

    5.4.1.1. Parameters affecting what documents we index:

   topdirs

           Specifies the list of directories or files to index (recursively

           for directories). You can use symbolic links as elements of this

           list. See the followLinks option about following symbolic links

           found under the top elements (not followed by default).

   skippedNames

           A space-separated list of patterns for names of files or

           directories that should be completely ignored. The list defined in

           the default file is:

 skippedNames = #* bin CVS  Cache cache* caughtspam  tmp .thumbnails .svn \

                *~ .beagle .git .hg .bzr loop.ps .xsession-errors \

                .recoll* xapiandb recollrc recoll.conf

           The list can be redefined at any sub-directory in the indexed

           area.

           The top-level directories are not affected by this list (that is,

           a directory in topdirs might match and would still be indexed).

           The list in the default configuration does not exclude hidden

           directories (names beginning with a dot), which means that it may

           index quite a few things that you do not want. On the other hand,

           email user agents like thunderbird usually store messages in

           hidden directories, and you probably want this indexed. One

           possible solution is to have .* in skippedNames, and add things

           like ~/.thunderbird or ~/.evolution in topdirs.

           Not even the file names are indexed for patterns in this list. See

           the recoll_noindex variable in mimemap for an alternative approach

           which indexes the file names.

   skippedPaths and daemSkippedPaths

           A space-separated list of patterns for paths of files or

           directories that should be skipped. There is no default in the

           sample configuration file, but the code always adds the

           configuration and database directories in there.

           skippedPaths is used both by batch and real time indexing.

           daemSkippedPaths can be used to specify things that should be

           indexed at startup, but not monitored.

           Example of use for skipping text files only in a specific

           directory:

 skippedPaths = ~/somedir/*.txt

   skippedPathsFnmPathname

           The values in the *skippedPaths variables are matched by default

           with fnmatch(3), with the FNM_PATHNAME and FNM_LEADING_DIR flags.

           This means that '/' characters must be matched explicitely. You

           can set skippedPathsFnmPathname to 0 to disable the use of

           FNM_PATHNAME (meaning that /*/dir3 will match /dir1/dir2/dir3).

   followLinks

           Specifies if the indexer should follow symbolic links while

           walking the file tree. The default is to ignore symbolic links to

           avoid multiple indexing of linked files. No effort is made to

           avoid duplication when this option is set to true. This option can

           be set individually for each of the topdirs members by using

           sections. It can not be changed below the topdirs level.

   indexedmimetypes

           Recoll normally indexes any file which it knows how to read. This

           list lets you restrict the indexed mime types to what you specify.

           If the variable is unspecified or the list empty (the default),

           all supported types are processed.

   compressedfilemaxkbs

           Size limit for compressed (.gz or .bz2) files. These need to be

           decompressed in a temporary directory for identification, which

           can be very wasteful if 'uninteresting' big compressed files are

           present. Negative means no limit, 0 means no processing of any

           compressed file. Defaults to -1.

   textfilemaxmbs

           Maximum size for text files. Very big text files are often

           uninteresting logs. Set to -1 to disable (default 20MB).

   textfilepagekbs

           If set to other than -1, text files will be indexed as multiple

           documents of the given page size. This may be useful if you do

           want to index very big text files as it will both reduce memory

           usage at index time and help with loading data to the preview

           window. A size of a few megabytes would seem reasonable (default:

           1MB).

   membermaxkbs

           This defines the maximum size in kilobytes for an archive member

           (zip, tar or rar at the moment). Bigger entries will be skipped.

   indexallfilenames

           Recoll indexes file names in a special section of the database to

           allow specific file names searches using wild cards. This

           parameter decides if file name indexing is performed only for

           files with mime types that would qualify them for full text

           indexing, or for all files inside the selected subtrees,

           independently of mime type.

   usesystemfilecommand

           Decide if we use the file -i system command as a final step for

           determining the mime type for a file (the main procedure uses

           suffix associations as defined in the mimemap file). This can be

           useful for files with suffix-less names, but it will also cause

           the indexing of many bogus "text" files.

   processwebqueue

           If this is set, process the directory where Web browser plugins

           copy visited pages for indexing.

   webqueuedir

           The path to the web indexing queue. This is hard-coded in the

           Firefox plugin as ~/.recollweb/ToIndex so there should be no need

           to change it.

    5.4.1.2. Parameters affecting how we generate terms:

   Changing some of these parameters will imply a full reindex. Also, when

   using multiple indexes, it may not make sense to search indexes that don't

   share the values for these parameters, because they usually affect both

   search and index operations.

   indexStripChars

           Decide if we strip characters of diacritics and convert them to

           lower-case before terms are indexed. If we don't, searches

           sensitive to case and diacritics can be performed, but the index

           will be bigger, and some marginal weirdness may sometimes occur.

           The default is a stripped index (indexStripChars = 1) for now.

           When using multiple indexes for a search, this parameter must be

           defined identically for all. Changing the value implies an index

           reset.

   maxTermExpand

           Maximum expansion count for a single term (e.g.: when using

           wildcards). The default of 10000 is reasonable and will avoid

           queries that appear frozen while the engine is walking the term

           list.

   maxXapianClauses

           Maximum number of elementary clauses we can add to a single Xapian

           query. In some cases, the result of term expansion can be

           multiplicative, and we want to avoid using excessive memory. The

           default of 100 000 should be both high enough in most cases and

           compatible with current typical hardware configurations.

   nonumbers

           If this set to true, no terms will be generated for numbers. For

           example "123", "1.5e6", 192.168.1.4, would not be indexed

           ("value123" would still be). Numbers are often quite interesting

           to search for, and this should probably not be set except for

           special situations, ie, scientific documents with huge amounts of

           numbers in them. This can only be set for a whole index, not for a

           subtree.

   nocjk

           If this set to true, specific east asian (Chinese Korean Japanese)

           characters/word splitting is turned off. This will save a small

           amount of cpu if you have no CJK documents. If your document base

           does include such text but you are not interested in searching it,

           setting nocjk may be a significant time and space saver.

   cjkngramlen

           This lets you adjust the size of n-grams used for indexing CJK

           text. The default value of 2 is probably appropriate in most

           cases. A value of 3 would allow more precision and efficiency on

           longer words, but the index will be approximately twice as large.

   indexstemminglanguages

           A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be

           built. See recollindex(1) or use the recollindex -l command for

           possible values. You can add a stem expansion database for a

           different language by using recollindex -s, but it will be deleted

           during the next indexing. Only languages listed in the

           configuration file are permanent.

   defaultcharset

           The name of the character set used for files that do not contain a

           character set definition (ie: plain text files). This can be

           redefined for any sub-directory. If it is not set at all, the

           character set used is the one defined by the nls environment (

           LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG), or iso8859-1 if nothing is set.

   unac_except_trans

           This is a list of characters, encoded in UTF-8, which should be

           handled specially when converting text to unaccented lowercase.

           For example, in Swedish, the letter a with diaeresis has full

           alphabet citizenship and should not be turned into an a. Each

           element in the space-separated list has the special character as

           first element and the translation following. The handling of both

           the lowercase and upper-case versions of a character should be

           specified, as appartenance to the list will turn-off both standard

           accent and case processing. Example for Swedish:

 unac_except_trans =  aaaa AAaa a:a: A:a: o:o: O:o:

           Note that the translation is not limited to a single character,

           you could very well have something like u:ue in the list.

           The default value set for unac_except_trans can't be listed here

           because I have trouble with SGML and UTF-8, but it only contains

           ligature decompositions: german ss, oe, ae, fi, fl.

           This parameter can't be defined for subdirectories, it is global,

           because there is no way to do otherwise when querying. If you have

           document sets which would need different values, you will have to

           index and query them separately.

   maildefcharset

           This can be used to define the default character set specifically

           for email messages which don't specify it. This is mainly useful

           for readpst (libpst) dumps, which are utf-8 but do not say so.

   localfields

           This allows setting fields for all documents under a given

           directory. Typical usage would be to set an "rclaptg" field, to be

           used in mimeview to select a specific viewer. If several fields

           are to be set, they should be separated with a colon (':')

           character (which there is currently no way to escape). Ie:

           localfields= rclaptg=gnus:other = val, then select specifier

           viewer with mimetype|tag=... in mimeview.

    5.4.1.3. Parameters affecting where and how we store things:

   dbdir

           The name of the Xapian data directory. It will be created if

           needed when the index is initialized. If this is not an absolute

           path, it will be interpreted relative to the configuration

           directory. The value can have embedded spaces but starting or

           trailing spaces will be trimmed. You cannot use quotes here.

   idxstatusfile

           The name of the scratch file where the indexer process updates its

           status. Default: idxstatus.txt inside the configuration directory.

   maxfsoccuppc

           Maximum file system occupation before we stop indexing. The value

           is a percentage, corresponding to what the "Capacity" df output

           column shows. The default value is 0, meaning no checking.

   mboxcachedir

           The directory where mbox message offsets cache files are held.

           This is normally $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mboxcache, but it may be useful

           to share a directory between different configurations.

   mboxcacheminmbs

           The minimum mbox file size over which we cache the offsets. There

           is really no sense in caching offsets for small files. The default

           is 5 MB.

   webcachedir

           This is only used by the web browser plugin indexing code, and

           defines where the cache for visited pages will live. Default:

           $RECOLL_CONFDIR/webcache

   webcachemaxmbs

           This is only used by the web browser plugin indexing code, and

           defines the maximum size for the web page cache. Default: 40 MB.

   idxflushmb

           Threshold (megabytes of new text data) where we flush from memory

           to disk index. Setting this can help control memory usage. A value

           of 0 means no explicit flushing, letting Xapian use its own

           default, which is flushing every 10000 (or XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD)

           documents, which gives little memory usage control, as memory

           usage also depends on average document size. The default value is

           10, and it is probably a bit low. If your system usually has free

           memory, you can try higher values between 20 and 80. In my

           experience, values beyond 100 are always counterproductive.

    5.4.1.4. Miscellaneous parameters:

   autodiacsens

           IF the index is not stripped, decide if we automatically trigger

           diacritics sensitivity if the search term has accented characters

           (not in unac_except_trans). Else you need to use the query

           language and the D modifier to specify diacritics sensitivity.

           Default is no.

   autocasesens

           IF the index is not stripped, decide if we automatically trigger

           character case sensitivity if the search term has upper-case

           characters in any but the first position. Else you need to use the

           query language and the C modifier to specify character-case

           sensitivity. Default is yes.

   loglevel,daemloglevel

           Verbosity level for recoll and recollindex. A value of 4 lists

           quite a lot of debug/information messages. 2 only lists errors.

           The daemversion is specific to the indexing monitor daemon.

   logfilename, daemlogfilename

           Where the messages should go. 'stderr' can be used as a special

           value, and is the default. The daemversion is specific to the

           indexing monitor daemon.

   mondelaypatterns

           This allows specify wildcard path patterns (processed with

           fnmatch(3) with 0 flag), to match files which change too often and

           for which a delay should be observed before re-indexing. This is a

           space-separated list, each entry being a pattern and a time in

           seconds, separated by a colon. You can use double quotes if a path

           entry contains white space. Example:

 mondelaypatterns = *.log:20 "this one has spaces*:10"

   monixinterval

           Minimum interval (seconds) for processing the indexing queue. The

           real time monitor does not process each event when it comes in,

           but will wait this time for the queue to accumulate to diminish

           overhead and in order to aggregate multiple events to the same

           file. Default 30 S.

   monauxinterval

           Period (in seconds) at which the real time monitor will regenerate

           the auxiliary databases (spelling, stemming) if needed. The

           default is one hour.

   monioniceclass, monioniceclassdata

           These allow defining the ionice class and data used by the indexer

           (default class 3, no data).

   filtermaxseconds

           Maximum filter execution time, after which it is aborted. Some

           postscript programs just loop...

   filtersdir

           A directory to search for the external filter scripts used to

           index some types of files. The value should not be changed, except

           if you want to modify one of the default scripts. The value can be

           redefined for any sub-directory.

   iconsdir

           The name of the directory where recoll result list icons are

           stored. You can change this if you want different images.

   idxabsmlen

           Recoll stores an abstract for each indexed file inside the

           database. The text can come from an actual 'abstract' section in

           the document or will just be the beginning of the document. It is

           stored in the index so that it can be displayed inside the result

           lists without decoding the original file. The idxabsmlen parameter

           defines the size of the stored abstract. The default value is 250

           bytes. The search interface gives you the choice to display this

           stored text or a synthetic abstract built by extracting text

           around the search terms. If you always prefer the synthetic

           abstract, you can reduce this value and save a little space.

   aspellLanguage

           Language definitions to use when creating the aspell dictionary.

           The value must match a set of aspell language definition files.

           You can type "aspell config" to see where these are installed

           (look for data-dir). The default if the variable is not set is to

           use your desktop national language environment to guess the value.

   noaspell

           If this is set, the aspell dictionary generation is turned off.

           Useful for cases where you don't need the functionality or when it

           is unusable because aspell crashes during dictionary generation.

   mhmboxquirks

           This allows definining location-related quirks for the mailbox

           handler. Currently only the tbird flag is defined, and it should

           be set for directories which hold Thunderbird data, as their

           folder format is weird.

  5.4.2. The fields file

   This file contains information about dynamic fields handling in Recoll.

   Some very basic fields have hard-wired behaviour, and, mostly, you should

   not change the original data inside the fields file. But you can create

   custom fields fitting your data and handle them just like they were native

   ones.

   The fields file has several sections, which each define an aspect of

   fields processing. Quite often, you'll have to modify several sections to

   obtain the desired behaviour.

   We will only give a short description here, you should refer to the

   comments inside the file for more detailed information.

   Field names should be lowercase alphabetic ASCII.

   [prefixes]

           A field becomes indexed (searchable) by having a prefix defined in

           this section.

   [stored]

           A field becomes stored (displayable inside results) by having its

           name listed in this section (typically with an empty value).

   [aliases]

           This section defines lists of synonyms for the canonical names

           used inside the [prefixes] and [stored] sections

   filter-specific sections

           Some filters may need specific configuration for handling fields.

           Only the email message filter currently has such a section (named

           [mail]). It allows indexing arbitrary email headers in addition to

           the ones indexed by default. Other such sections may appear in the

           future.

   Here follows a small example of a personal fields file. This would extract

   a specific email header and use it as a searchable field, with data

   displayable inside result lists. (Side note: as the email filter does no

   decoding on the values, only plain ascii headers can be indexed, and only

   the first occurrence will be used for headers that occur several times).

 [prefixes]

 # Index mailmytag contents (with the given prefix)

 mailmytag = XMTAG

 [stored]

 # Store mailmytag inside the document data record (so that it can be

 # displayed - as %(mailmytag) - in result lists).

 mailmytag =

 [mail]

 # Extract the X-My-Tag mail header, and use it internally with the

 # mailmytag field name

 x-my-tag = mailmytag

  5.4.3. The mimemap file

   mimemap specifies the file name extension to mime type mappings.

   For file names without an extension, or with an unknown one, the system's

   file -i command will be executed to determine the mime type (this can be

   switched off inside the main configuration file).

   The mappings can be specified on a per-subtree basis, which may be useful

   in some cases. Example: gaim logs have a .txt extension but should be

   handled specially, which is possible because they are usually all located

   in one place.

   mimemap also has a recoll_noindex variable which is a list of suffixes.

   Matching files will be skipped (which avoids unnecessary decompressions or

   file executions). This is partially redundant with skippedNames in the

   main configuration file, with a few differences: it will not affect

   directories, it cannot be made dependant on the file-system location (it

   is a configuration-wide parameter), and the file names will still be

   indexed (not even the file names are indexed for patterns in skippedNames.

   recoll_noindex is used mostly for things known to be unindexable by a

   given Recoll version. Having it there avoids cluttering the more

   user-oriented and locally customized skippedNames.

  5.4.4. The mimeconf file

   mimeconf specifies how the different mime types are handled for indexing,

   and which icons are displayed in the recoll result lists.

   Changing the parameters in the [index] section is probably not a good idea

   except if you are a Recoll developer.

   The [icons] section allows you to change the icons which are displayed by

   recoll in the result lists (the values are the basenames of the png images

   inside the iconsdir directory (specified in recoll.conf).

  5.4.5. The mimeview file

   mimeview specifies which programs are started when you click on an Open

   link in a result list. Ie: HTML is normally displayed using firefox, but

   you may prefer Konqueror, your openoffice.org program might be named

   oofice instead of openoffice etc.

   Changes to this file can be done by direct editing, or through the recoll

   GUI preferences dialog.

   If Use desktop preferences to choose document editor is checked in the

   Recoll GUI preferences, all mimeview entries will be ignored except the

   one labelled application/x-all (which is set to use xdg-open by default).

   In this case, the xallexcepts top level variable defines a list of mime

   type exceptions which will be processed according to the local entries

   instead of being passed to the desktop. This is so that specific Recoll

   options such as a page number or a search string can be passed to

   applications that support them, such as the evince viewer.

   As for the other configuration files, the normal usage is to have a

   mimeview inside your own configuration directory, with just the

   non-default entries, which will override those from the central

   configuration file.

   All viewer definition entries must be placed under a [view] section.

   The keys in the file are normally mime types. You can add an application

   tag to specialize the choice for an area of the filesystem (using a

   localfields specification in mimeconf). The syntax for the key is

   mimetype|tag

   The nouncompforviewmts entry, (placed at the top level, outside of the

   [view] section), holds a list of mime types that should not be

   uncompressed before starting the viewer (if they are found compressed, ie:

   mydoc.doc.gz).

   The right side of each assignment holds a command to be executed for

   opening the file. The following substitutions are performed:

     o %D. Document date

     o %f. File name. This may be the name of a temporary file if it was

       necessary to create one (ie: to extract a subdocument from a

       container).

     o %F. Original file name. Same as %f except if a temporary file is used.

     o %i. Internal path, for subdocuments of containers. The format depends

       on the container type. If this appears in the command line, Recoll

       will not create a temporary file to extract the subdocument, expecting

       the called application (possibly a script) to be able to handle it.

     o %M. Mime type

     o %p. Page index. Only significant for a subset of document types,

       currently only PDF, Postscript and DVI files. Can be used to start the

       editor at the right page for a match or snippet.

     o %s. Search term. The value will only be set for documents with indexed

       page numbers (ie: PDF). The value will be one of the matched search

       terms. It would allow pre-setting the value in the "Find" entry inside

       Evince for example, for easy highlighting of the term.

     o %U, %u. Url.

   In addition to the predefined values above, all strings like %(fieldname)

   will be replaced by the value of the field named fieldname for the

   document. This could be used in combination with field customisation to

   help with opening the document.

  5.4.6. Examples of configuration adjustments

    5.4.6.1. Adding an external viewer for an non-indexed type

   Imagine that you have some kind of file which does not have indexable

   content, but for which you would like to have a functional Open link in

   the result list (when found by file name). The file names end in .blob and

   can be displayed by application blobviewer.

   You need two entries in the configuration files for this to work:

     o In $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mimemap (typically ~/.recoll/mimemap), add the

       following line:

 .blob = application/x-blobapp

       Note that the mime type is made up here, and you could call it

       diesel/oil just the same.

     o In $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mimeview under the [view] section, add:

 application/x-blobapp = blobviewer %f

       We are supposing that blobviewer wants a file name parameter here, you

       would use %u if it liked URLs better.

   If you just wanted to change the application used by Recoll to display a

   mime type which it already knows, you would just need to edit mimeview.

   The entries you add in your personal file override those in the central

   configuration, which you do not need to alter. mimeview can also be

   modified from the Gui.

    5.4.6.2. Adding indexing support for a new file type

   Let us now imagine that the above .blob files actually contain indexable

   text and that you know how to extract it with a command line program.

   Getting Recoll to index the files is easy. You need to perform the above

   alteration, and also to add data to the mimeconf file (typically in

   ~/.recoll/mimeconf):

     o Under the [index] section, add the following line (more about the

       rclblob indexing script later):

 application/x-blobapp = exec rclblob

     o Under the [icons] section, you should choose an icon to be displayed

       for the files inside the result lists. Icons are normally 64x64 pixels

       PNG files which live in /usr/[local/]share/recoll/images.

     o Under the [categories] section, you should add the mime type where it

       makes sense (you can also create a category). Categories may be used

       for filtering in advanced search.

   The rclblob filter should be an executable program or script which exists

   inside /usr/[local/]share/recoll/filters. It will be given a file name as

   argument and should output the text or html contents on the standard

   output.

   The filter programming section describes in more detail how to write a

   filter.

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