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A more complete version of this document can be found at http://www.recoll.org
* Home
* Screenshots
* Credits
* Downloads
* Installation
* User manual
[IMG]
Recoll
Recoll is a personal full text search package for Linux, FreeBSD and other
Unix systems.
Recoll is based on a very strong backend (Xapian), for which it provides
an easy to use, feature-rich, easy administration interface.
Recoll is free and copyrighted under the GPL license, see COPYING inside
the distribution. A lot of the code is imported from other packages, see
the Credits.
Features:
* QT-based GUI.
* Supports the following document types:
* text.
* html.
* OpenOffice files.
* maildir and mailbox mail folders (Mozilla and Thunderbird mail
ok).
* pdf (with pdftotext).
* postscript (with ghostscript's pstotext).
* msword (with antiword).
* rtf text (with unrtf).
* gaim log files.
along with their compressed versions.
* Powerful query facilities, with boolean searches, phrases, filter on
file types and directory tree.
* Support for multiple charsets. Internal processing and storage uses
Unicode UTF-8.
* Stemming performed at query time (can switch stemming language after
indexing)
* Easy installation. No database daemon, web server or exotic language
necessary.
* An indexer which runs either as a thread inside the GUI or as an
external, cron'able program.
Recoll has been compiled and tested on FreeBSD, Linux, Darwin and Solaris
(versions FreeBSD 5.3, Redhat 7.3, Solaris 8, but other not too distant
releases should be ok too). You can download the source code here.
Future evolutions
Things hopefully coming in the not too far future (especially with some
help):
* Support for the more advanced Xapian concepts like relevance feedback.
* An interactive configuration tool.
* Rpms or other kinds of packages.
* A more polished user interface with online help and better
documentation.
* More translations for the user interface.
* A few more filters for less common file types.
* Integration with the KDE desktop.
I very much welcome suggestions or (gasp) code.
In hope that this can be useful to somebody, it already is for me.
* Home
* Screenshots
* Credits
* Downloads
* Installation
* User manual
Credits
Recoll borrows (steals?) heavily from the following projects. I tried to
include the relevant copyright attributions with the code. Any omission is
unintentional and will be fixed as soon as notified.
* Xapian: The database module (core) is used unmodified, and quite a lot
of code has been borrowed from Omega, the web-based search application
(ie: the html parser, plus miscellaneous bits and ideas).
* Estraier: Miscellaneous pieces of code and ideas, especially for
charset handling, and code from external filters.
* Unac: for accent removal. This is a relatively small package, not that
easy to find, it has been integrated almost unmodified in the Recoll
package.
* Iconv, for character set conversion.
* Binc IMAP for MIME parsing code.
* I fear that bugs found elsewhere are mostly mine:
jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr
* Home
* Screenshots
* Credits
* Downloads
* Installation
* User manual
Introduction: full text search.
A full text search program will let you search for data by specifying the
terms that you think appear in the content you are looking for.
You do not need to remember in what file or email message you stored a
given piece of information. You just ask for related terms, and the tool
will return a list of documents where those terms are prominent.
In addition, the tool will automatically expand your search to terms
related to the ones you specified. Ie: a search for floor will also look
for floors, flooring etc. With Recoll you can disable this expansion when
entering the query.
Recoll, like most such search tools, works by remembering where terms
appear in your document files. The acquisition process is called
indexation. The resulting database can be big, in practise, roughly the
size of the original document set.
Recoll is not a document archive. It can only display data from files that
still exist where they lived when they were indexed.
Using Recoll
Indexation
By default, Recoll will index your home directory. If you want to change
this, you need to edit the configuration file ($HOME/.recoll/recoll.conf
or $RECOLL_CONFDIR/recoll.conf if RECOLL_CONFDIR is set). Follow the
comments in the file to adjust the parameters.
Indexation is performed either by starting the recollindex program, or the
indexing thread inside the recoll program (use the File menu).
It is best to avoid interrupting the indexation process, as this may
sometimes leave the database in a bad state. This is not a serious
problem, as you then just need to clear everything and restart the
indexation. The database files are normally stored in the
$HOME/.recoll/xapiandb directory, which you can just delete when needed.
Alternatively, you can start recollindex -z, which will reset the database
before indexing.
Simple search
Start the recoll program, then enter search term(s) in the text field at
the top left of the window. Clicking the Search button or hitting the
Enter key will start a search. By default, this will look for documents
with any of the terms (the ones with more terms will get better scores).
Use the Tools / Advanced search dialog for other kinds of searches
A list of results will be displayed in the main list window. Clicking on
an entry will open an internal preview window for the document.
Double-clicking will attempt to start an external viewer (have a look at
the ~/.recoll/mimeconf file to see how these are configured).
Documents that you actually view (with the internal preview or an external
tool) are entered into the document history, which is remembered. You can
display the history list by using the Tools / Doc History menu entry.
By default, the document list is presented in order of relevance (how well
the system estimates that the document matches the query). You can specify
a different ordering by using the Tools / Sort parameters dialog.
Search tips, shortcuts
Entering a capitalized word in any search field will prevent stem
expansion (example: Recoll will not look for gardening if you enter Garden
instead of garden). This is the only case where character case will make a
difference for a Recoll search.
A phrase can be looked for by enclosing it in double quotes. Example:
"user manual" will look only for occurrences of user immediately followed
by manual.
Entering ^Q almost anywhere will close the application.
Entering ^W in a preview tab will close it (and, for the last tab, close
the preview window).
Complex/advanced search
The advanced search dialog has fields that will allow a more refined
search, looking for documents with all given words, a given exact phrase,
or none of the given words (all fields may be combined by an implicit AND
clause).
It will let you search for documents of specific mime types (ie: only
text/plain, or text/html or application/pdf etc...)
It will let you restrict the search results to a subtree of the indexed
area.
In other respects, it works like the simple search.
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