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<h1>Release notes for Recoll 1.18.x</h1>
<h2>Caveats</h2>
<p><em>Installing over an older version</em>: 1.18 introduces
significant index formats changes to support optional
character case and diacritics sensitivity, and it will be
advisable to reset the index in most cases. This will be best
done by destroying the index directory (<tt>rm -rf
~/.recoll/xapiandb</tt>).<br>
<em>If</em> 1.18 is not configured for case and
diacritics sensitivity, it is mostly compatible with 1.17
indexes.</p>
<p>Case/diacritics sensitivity is off by default for this
release. It can be turned on <em>only</em> by editing recoll.conf
(<a href="usermanual/usermanual.html#RCL.INDEXING.CONFIG.SENS">
see the manual</a>). If you do so, you must then reset the index.</p>
<p>Always reset the index if installing over an even older
version (1.16 and older). The simplest way to do this is to
quit all recoll programs and just delete the index directory
(<span class="literal">rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb</span>),
then start recoll or
recollindex. <span class="literal">recollindex -z</span>
will do the same in most, but not all, cases.</p>
<p>The subdirectories of xapiandb which were previously used to
store the stem expansion database (stem_english,
stem_french...) are not used anymore, because the data is now
stored in the Xapian synonyms table. They will stay around if
you do nothing about them, so you may want to delete them if
you have not chosen to just delete the whole index
directory.</p>
<p><span class="important">Viewer exceptions</span>:
There is a new list of mime types that should be opened with
the locally configured application even when <em>Use
Desktop Preferences</em> is checked. This allows making
use of new functions (direct access to page), which could not
be available through the desktop's <tt>xdg-open</tt>. The
default list contains PDF, Postscript and DVI, which should be
opened with the <em>evince</em> (or <em>atril</em> for
Mint/MATE users) viewer for the page access functions to
work. If you want to keep the previous behaviour (losing the
page number functionality), you need to prune the list after
installation . This can be done from the <em>Preferences->Gui
Configuration</em> menu.</p>
<h2>Changes</h2>
<p>Recoll 1.18 has some major changes, the most visible of
which is the ability to search for exact matches of character case
and diacritics.</p>
<ul>
<li>The index can now be configured for case and diacritics
sensitivity, in which case raw terms are indexed. On such an
index, search insensitivity to case and diacriics is obtained,
when desired, by query time expansion, in a similar manner to
what is used for stemming. See the
<a href="usermanual/usermanual.html#RCL.INDEXING.CONFIG.SENS">
manual chapter for details</a> about controlling the
feature. The capacity for case/diacritics sensitivity is
off by default, and you should not see differences in this
respect after upgrading if you do not turn it on
explicitely. Even on a raw index, most searches should
behave like they did in 1.17. Sensitivity must be
explicitely requested in most cases.</li>
<li>The advanced search screen now has a history
function. While the focus is in this window, you
can walk the history of searches using the up and down
arrows.</li>
<li>Recoll has a new capacity to store page break locations
and use them when opening a document at the location for a
given match. It will also pass a search string to the viewer
application. This currently works with PDF, Postscript and DVI
documents, and, optimally, the <b>evince</b> viewer.</li>
<li>The GUI result list has a new "snippets" window for
documents with page numbers, which let the user choose a
snippet and open the document at the appropriate page.</li>
<li>There is a list of MIME types that should be opened with
the locally configured application even when <em>Use
Desktop Preferences</em> is checked. This will permit, for
example, using <b>evince</b> for its page access
capabilities on PDF files, while letting the desktop handle
all the other mime types. The list is not empty by default,
it contains PDF, Postscript and DVI, so you may want to
reset it after installation if you want to keep the previous
behaviour (losing the page number functionality). This can
be done from the <em>Preferences->Gui Configuration</em>
menu.</li>
<li>We now allow multiple directory specifications in the query
language, as in: <i>dir:/home/me -dir:tmp</i></li>
<li>The search inside the GUI preview window, has been
improved, and allows selecting from a list one of the
initial term groups as the search target.</li>
<li>A new script dedicated to laptops, which can start or stop
recollindex according to mains power status.</li>
<li>Added <pre style="white-space: pre-wrap"> to plain
text HTML display options. This will often be the best
option to display plain text: it will better respect
indentation, while folding long lines.</li>
<li>When running in an UTF-8 locale, and after failing to decode a
plain text file as UTF-8, indexing will try again using an 8 bit
character set heuristically chosen according to the locale
language code. This uses the LANG environment variable.</li>
<li>On initial installation (when the <em>~/.recoll</em>
directory does not exist), recoll will install a list of
characters which should not be stripped of diacritics,
according to the detected national language (based on
$LANG). There are currently specific lists for German (don't
strip the umlauts), and Nordic languages (keep the letters
with circle above in addition to the German list). Other
languages currently only have exceptions which result in
decomposing ligatures (fl, fi etc.). You can have a look at
the standard recoll.conf in /usr/share/recoll/examples for
more information.</li>
<li>A new configuration variable, <tt>maxmemberkbs</tt>, has been
implemented to limit the size of archive members we process. This
will avoid trying to read a 4 GB ISO from a zip archive as
happened in the past...</li>
<li>Proper error reporting when a wildcard expansion is
truncated for size. An incomplete search could previously be
performed without any indication.</li>
<li>More effort is also put in choosing the terms used in
generating the snippets inside the result list.</li>
<li>Recoll now uses the Xapian "synonyms" mechanism to store all
data about stemming, case, and diacritics expansion (this
replaces the previous ad-hoc stemming expansion
mechanism).</li>
<li>Partial autodetection of thunderbird mailboxes found out
of the configured location.</li>
<li>Fixed bugs:
<ul>
<li>The unac_except_trans mechanism could be buggy in some
cases and generate wrong character translations.</li>
<li>Don't terminate monitor for permissions-related
addwatch error.</li>
<li>Fix handling of ODF documents exported by Google
docs.</li>
<li>It was previously impossible to open the parent of an
embedded document (e.g. the CHM file for an HTML page
inside the CHM) if the parent was itself a member of an
archive.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
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