A more complete version of this document can be found at http://www.recoll.org


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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. You need to edit files by hand for
       now.
     * Packages, rpm or other. It's all tar files currently.
     * A more polished user interface with online help and better
       documentation.
     * Translations for the user interface.
     * A few more filters for less common file types.
     * An history tool for queries and documents.
     * 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.
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  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
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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).
   Follow the comments in the file to adjust the parameters.

   Indexing is performed either by starting the recollindex program, or by
   the indexing thread inside the recoll program (use the File menu).

  Simple search

   Enter search term(s) in the text field at the top left. 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 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).

  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).

   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.