git clone https://@opensourceprojects.eu/git/p/recoll1/code recoll1-code
Read Me
More documentation can be found in the doc/ directory or at http://www.recoll.org
Recoll user manual
Jean-Francois Dockes
<jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr>
Copyright (c) 2005 Jean-Francois Dockes
This document introduces full text search notions and describes the
installation and use of the Recoll application.
[ Split HTML / Single HTML ]
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Giving it a try
1.2. Full text search
1.3. Recoll overview
2. Indexing
2.1. Introduction
2.2. Index storage
2.2.1. Security aspects
2.3. The indexing configuration
2.4. Starting indexing
2.5. Using cron to automate indexing
3. Search
3.1. Simple search
3.2. The result list
3.2.1. The result list right-click menu
3.3. The preview window
3.4. Complex/advanced search
3.5. Multiple databases
3.6. Document history
3.7. Sorting search results
3.8. Search tips, shortcuts
3.9. Customizing the search interface
4. Installation
4.1. Installing a prebuilt copy
4.1.1. Installing through a package system
4.1.2. Installing a prebuilt Recoll
4.2. Packages needed for external file types
4.3. Building from source
4.3.1. Prerequisites
4.3.2. Building
4.3.3. Installation
4.4. Configuration overview
4.4.1. Main configuration file
4.4.2. The mimemap file
4.4.3. The mimeconf file
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Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1. Giving it a try
If you do not like reading manuals (who does?) and would like to give
Recoll a try, just perform installation and start the recoll user
interface, which will index your home directory by default, allowing you
to search immediately after indexing completes.
Do not do this if your home directory contains a huge number of documents
and you do not want to wait or are very short on disk space. In this case,
you may want to edit the configuration file first to restrict the indexed
area.
Also be aware that you may need to install the appropriate supporting
applications for document types that need them (for example antiword for
ms-word files).
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1.2. Full text search
Recoll is a full text search application. Full text search applications
let you find your data by content rather than by external attributes (like
a file name). More specifically, they will let you specify words (terms)
that should or should not appear in the text you are looking for, and
return a list of matching documents, ordered so that the most relevant
documents will appear first.
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 a
similar way to Internet search engines.
Recoll tries to determine which documents are most relevant to the search
terms you provide. Computer algorithms for determining relevance can be
very complex, and in general are inferior to the power of the human mind
to rapidly determine relevance. The quality of relevance guessing by the
search tool is probably the most important element for a search
application.
In many cases, you are looking for all the forms of a word, not for a
specific form or spelling. These different forms may include plurals,
different tenses for a verb, or terms derived from the same root or stem
(example: floor, floors, floored, flooring...). Recoll will by default
expand queries to all such related terms (words that reduce to the same
stem). This expansion can be disabled at search time.
Stemming, by itself, does not accommodate for misspellings or phonetic
searches. Recoll currently does not support these features.
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1.3. Recoll overview
Recoll uses the Xapian information retrieval library as its storage and
retrieval engine. Xapian is a very mature package using a sophisticated
probabilistic ranking model. Recoll provides the interface to get data
into (indexing) and out (searching) of the system.
In practice, Xapian works by remembering where terms appear in your
document files. The acquisition process is called indexing.
The resulting index can be big (roughly the size of the original document
set), but it is not a document archive. Recoll can only display documents
that still exist at the place from which they were indexed. (Actually,
there is a way to reconstruct a document from the information in the
index, but the result is not nice, as all formatting, punctuation and
capitalization are lost).
Recoll stores all internal data in Unicode UTF-8 format, and it can index
files with different character sets, encodings, and languages into the
same index. It has input filters for many document types.
Stemming depends on the document language. Recoll stores the unstemmed
versions of terms and uses auxiliary databases for term expansion. It can
switch stemming languages, or add a language, without re-indexing. Storing
documents in different languages in the same index is possible, and useful
in practice, but does introduce possibilities of confusion. Recoll
currently makes no attempt at automatic language recognition.
Recoll has many parameters which define exactly what to index, and how to
classify and decode the source documents. These are kept in a
configuration file. A default configuration is copied into a standard
location (usually something like /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples)
during installation. The default parameters from this file may be
overridden by values that you set inside your personal configuration,
found by default in the .recoll sub-directory of your home directory. The
default configuration will index your home directory with default
parameters and should be sufficient for giving Recoll a try, but you may
want to adjust it later.
Indexing is started automatically the first time you execute the recoll
search graphical user interface, or by executing the recollindex command.
Searches are performed inside the recoll program, which has many options
to help you find what you are looking for.
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Chapter 2. Indexing
2.1. Introduction
Indexing is the process by which the set of documents is analyzed and the
data entered into the database. Recoll indexing is normally incremental:
documents will only be processed if they have been modified. On the first
execution, of course, all documents will need processing. A full index
build can be forced later on by specifying an option to the indexing
command (recollindex -z).
Recoll indexing takes place at discrete times. There is currently no
interface to real time file modification monitors. The typical usage is to
have a nightly indexing run programmed into your cron file.
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| There is nothing in Recoll and Xapian that would prevent interfacing |
| with a real time file modification monitor, but this would tend to |
| consume significant system resources for dubious gain, because you |
| rarely need a full text search to find documents you just modified. |
| recollindex -i can be used to add individual files to the index if you |
| want to play with this, see the manual page. |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Recoll knows about quite a few different document types. The parameters
for document types recognition and processing are set in configuration
files Most file types, like HTML or word processing files, only hold one
document. Some file types, like mail folder files can hold many
individually indexed documents.
Recoll indexing processes plain text, HTML, openoffice and e-mail files
internally. Other types (ie: postscript, pdf, ms-word, rtf) need external
applications for preprocessing. The list is in the installation section.
Without further configuration, Recoll will index all appropriate files
from your home directory, with a reasonable set of defaults.
In some cases, it may be interesting to index different areas of the file
system to separate databases. You can do this by using multiple
configuration directories, each indexing a file system area to a specific
database. You would use the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c
confdir option to recollindex to indicate which configuration to process.
The recoll search program can use any selection of the existing databases
for each search, this is configurable inside the user interface.
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2.2. Index storage
The default location for the index data is the $HOME/.recoll/xapiandb/
directory. This can be changed by setting the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment
variable, or by specifying the dbdir parameter in the configuration file
(see the configuration section).
The size of the index is determined by the size of the set of documents,
but the ratio can vary a lot. For a typical mixed set of documents, the
index size will often be close to the data set size. In specific cases (a
set of compressed mbox files for example), the index can become much
bigger than the documents. It may also be much smaller if the documents
contain a lot of images or other non-indexed data (an extreme example
being a set of mp3 files where only the tags would be indexed).
Of course, images, sound and video do not increase the index size, which
means that it will be quite typical nowadays (2006), that even a big index
will be negligible against the total amount of data on the computer.
The index data directory (xapiandb) only contains data that will be
rebuilt by an index run, and it can always be destroyed safely.
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2.2.1. Security aspects
The Recoll index does not hold copies of the indexed documents. But it
does hold enough data to allow for an almost complete reconstruction. If
confidential data is indexed, access to the database directory should be
restricted.
As of version 1.4, Recoll will create the configuration directory with a
mode of 0700 (access by owner only). As the index data directory is by
default a sub-directory of the configuration directory, this should result
in appropriate protection.
If you use another setup, you should think of the kind of protection you
need for your index, and set the directory and files access modes
appropriately.
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2.3. The indexing configuration
Values set in the system-wide configuration file (named like
/usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples/recoll.conf) can be overridden by those
set in the personal one, named $HOME/.recoll/recoll.conf by default or
$RECOLL_CONFDIR/recoll.conf if RECOLL_CONFDIR is set.
The most accurate documentation for editing the file is given by comments
inside the central one. If you want to adjust the configuration before
indexing, just click Cancel when the program asks if it should start
initial indexing. This will have created a .recoll directory containing
empty configuration files.
The configuration is also documented inside the installation chapter of
this document, or in the recoll.conf(5) man page.
The applications needed to index file types other than text, HTML or email
(ie: pdf, postscript, ms-word...) are described in the external packages
section
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2.4. Starting indexing
Indexing is performed either by the recollindex program, or by the
indexing thread inside the recoll program (use the File menu). Both
programs will use of the RECOLL_CONFDIR variable or accept a -c confdir
option to specify the configuration directory to be used.
If the recoll program finds no index when it starts, it will automatically
start indexing (except if canceled).
It is best to avoid interrupting the indexing process, as this may
sometimes leave the index in a bad state. This is not a serious problem,
as you then just need to clear everything and restart the indexing: the
index files are normally stored in the $HOME/.recoll/xapiandb directory,
which you can just delete if needed. Alternatively, you can start
recollindex with option -z, which will reset the database before indexing.
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2.5. Using cron to automate indexing
The most common way to set up indexing is to have a cron task execute it
every night. For example the following crontab entry would do it every day
at 3:30AM (supposing recollindex is in your PATH):
30 3 * * * recollindex > /tmp/recolltrace 2>&1
The usual command to edit your crontab is crontab -e (which will usually
start the vi editor to edit the file). You may have more sophisticated
tools available on your system.
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Chapter 3. Search
The recoll program provides the user interface for searching. It is based
on the QT library.
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3.1. Simple search
1. Start the recoll program.
2. Possibly choose a search mode: Any term or All terms or File name.
3. Enter search term(s) in the text field at the top of the window.
4. Click the Search button or hit the Enter key to start the search.
The initial default search mode is Any term. This will look for documents
with any of the search terms (the ones with more terms will get better
scores). All terms will ensure that only documents with all the terms will
be returned. File name will specifically look for file names, and allows
using wildcards (*, ? , []).
You can search for exact phrases (adjacent words in a given order) by
enclosing the input inside double quotes. Ex: "virtual reality".
Character case has no influence on search, except that you can disable
stem expansion for any term by capitalizing it. Ie: a search for floor
will also normally look for flooring, floored, etc., but a search for
Floor will only look for floor, in any character case (stemming can also
be disabled globally in the preferences).
Recoll remembers the last few searches that you performed. You can use the
simple search text entry widget (a combobox) to recall them (click on the
thing at the right of the text field). Please note, however, that only the
search texts are remembered, not the mode (all/any/file name).
Hitting ^Tab (Ctrl + Tab) while entering a word in the simple search entry
will open a window with possible completions for the word. The completions
are extracted from the database.
Double-clicking on a word in the result list or a preview window will
insert it into the simple search entry field.
You can use the Tools / Advanced search dialog for more complex searches.
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3.2. The result list
After starting a search, a list of results will instantly be displayed in
the main list window.
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.
Clicking on the Preview link for an entry will open an internal preview
window for the document. Clicking the Edit link will attempt to start an
external viewer (have a look at the mimeconf configuration file to see how
these are configured).
The Preview and Edit edit links may not be present for all entries,
meaning that Recoll has no configured way to preview a given file type
(which was indexed by name only), or no configured external viewer for the
file type. This can sometimes be adjusted simply by tweaking the mimemap
and mimeconf configuration files.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to
see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other
processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window
will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in
the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the
bottom of the page to browse the results.
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3.2.1. The result list right-click menu
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by
right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the
following entries:
* Preview
* Edit
* Copy File Name
* Copy Url
* Find similar
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The two following entries will copy either an URL or the file path to the
clipboard, for pasting into another application.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the
current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then
start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to
the current result.
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3.3. The preview window
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the
result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the
existing window.
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview
window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing
the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager
button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list
inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the
arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You
initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or
by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search
string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the
next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get
to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the
results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the
string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of
the search string.
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3.4. Complex/advanced search
The advanced search dialog has fields that will allow a more refined
search, looking for documents with all given elements, a given exact
phrase, none of the given elements, or a given file name (with wildcard
expansion). All relevant fields will be combined by an implicit AND
clause. All fields except "Exact phrase" can accept a mix of single words
and phrases enclosed in double quotes.
Advanced search will let you search for documents of specific mime types
(ie: only text/plain, or text/HTML or application/pdf etc...). The state
of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type
filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in
the restored state).
You can also restrict the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed
area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple
indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type
Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window
always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see
the query expansion.
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3.5. Multiple databases
Multiple Recoll databases or indexes can be created by using several
configuration directories which are usually set to index different areas
of the file system. A specific index can be selected for updating or
searching, using the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option
to recoll and recollindex.
A recollindex program instance can only update one specific index.
A recoll program instance is also associated with a specific index, which
is the one to be updated by its indexing thread, but it can use any number
of Recoll indexes for searching. The external indexes can be selected
through the external indexes tab in the preferences dialog.
Index selection is performed in two phases. A set of all usable indexes
must first be defined, and then the subset of indexes to be used for
searching. Of course, these parameters are retained across program
executions (there are kept separately for each Recoll configuration). The
set of all indexes is usually quite stable, while the active ones might
typically be adjusted quite frequently.
The main index (defined by RECOLL_CONFDIR) is always active. If this is
undesirable, you can set up your base configuration to index an empty
directory.
As building the set of all indexes can be a little tedious when done
through the user interface, you can use the RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS environment
variable to provide an initial set. This might typically be set up by a
system administrator so that every user does not have to do it. The
variable should define a colon-separated list of index directories, ie:
export RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS=/some/place/xapiandb:/some/other/db
A typical usage scenario for the multiple index feature would be for a
system administrator to set up a central index for shared data, that you
may choose to search, or not, in addition to your personal data. Of
course, there are other possibilities. There are many cases where you know
the subset of files that you want to be searched for a given query, and
where restricting the query will much improve the precision of the
results. This can also be performed with the directory filter in advanced
search, but multiple indexes will have much better performance and may be
worth the trouble.
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3.6. Document history
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.
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3.7. Sorting search results
The documents in a result list are normally sorted in order of relevance.
It is possible to specify different sort parameters by using the Sort
parameters dialog (located in the Tools menu).
The tool sorts a specified number of the most relevant documents in the
result list, according to specified criteria. The currently available
criteria are date and mime type.
The sort parameters stay in effect until they are explicitly reset, or the
program exits. An activated sort is indicated in the result list header.
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3.8. Search tips, shortcuts
Term completion. Typing ^TAB (Control + Tab) in the simple search entry
field while entering a word will either complete the current word if its
beginning matches a unique term in the index, or open a window to propose
a list of completions
Picking up new terms from result or preview text. Double-clicking on a
word in the result list or in a preview window will copy it to the simple
search entry field.
Disabling stem expansion. Entering a capitalized word in any search field
will prevent stem expansion (no search for gardening if you enter Garden
instead of garden). This is the only case where character case should make
a difference for a Recoll search. You can also disable stem expansion or
change the stemming language in the preferences.
Phrases. 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. You can use the This exact phrase field of the
advanced search dialog to the same effect. Phrases can be entered along
simple terms in all simple or advanced search entry fields (except This
exact phrase).
Browsing the result list inside a preview window (1.5). Entering
Shift-Down or Shift-Up (Shift + an arrow key) in a preview window will
display the next or the previous document from the result list. Any
secondary search currently active will be executed on the new document.
AutoPhrases (1.5). This option can be set in the preferences dialog. If it
is set, a phrase will be automatically built and added to simple searches
when looking for Any terms. This will not change radically the results,
but will give a relevance boost to the results where the search terms
appear as a phrase. Ie: searching for virtual reality will still find all
documents where either virtual or reality or both appear, but those which
contain virtual reality should appear sooner in the list.
Finding related documents. Selecting the Find similar documents entry in
the result list paragraph right-click menu will select a set of
"interesting" terms from the current result, and insert them into the
simple search entry field. You can then possibly edit the list and start a
search to find documents which may be apparented to the current result.
File names. File names are added as terms during indexing, and you can
specify them as ordinary terms in normal search fields (Recoll used to
index all directories in the file path as terms. This has been abandoned
as it did not seem really useful). Alternatively, you can use the specific
file name search which will only look for file names and can use wildcard
expansion.
Query explanation. You can get an exact description of what the query
looked for, including stem expansion, and Boolean operators used, by
clicking on the result list header.
Closing previews. Entering ^W in a tab will close it (and, for the last
tab, close the preview window). Entering Esc will close the preview window
and all its tabs.
Quitting. Entering ^Q almost anywhere will close the application.
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3.9. Customizing the search interface
It is possible to customize some aspects of the search interface by using
Query configuration entry in the Preferences menu.
There are two tabs in the dialog, dealing with the interface itself, and
with the parameters used for searching and returning results.
User interface parameters:
* Number of results in a result page
* Result list font: There is quite a lot of information shown in the
result list, and you may want to customize the font and/or font size.
The rest of the fonts used by Recoll are determined by your generic QT
config (try the qtconfig command.
* HTML help browser: this will let you chose your preferred browser
which will be started from the Help menu to read the user manual. You
can enter a simple name if the command is in your PATH, or browse for
a full pathname.
* Show document type icons in result list: icons in the result list can
be turned off. They take quite a lot of space and convey relatively
little useful information.
* Auto-start simple search on white space entry: if this is checked, a
search will be executed each time you enter a space in the simple
search input field. This lets you look at the result list as you enter
new terms. This is off by default, you may like it or not...
Search parameters:
* Stemming language: stemming obviously depends on the document's
language. This listbox will let you chose among the stemming databases
which were built during indexing (this is set in the main
configuration file), or later added with recollindex -s (See the
recollindex manual). Stemming languages which are dynamically added
will be deleted at the next indexing pass unless they are also added
in the configuration file.
* Dynamically build abstracts: this decides if Recoll tries to build
document abstracts when displaying the result list. Abstracts are
constructed by taking context from the document information, around
the search terms. This can slow down result list display significantly
for big documents, and you may want to turn it off.
* Replace abstracts from documents: this decides if we should synthesize
and display an abstract in place of an explicit abstract found within
the document itself.
* Synthetic abstract size: adjust to taste...
* Synthetic abstract context words: how many words should be displayed
around each term occurrence.
External indexes: This panel will let you browse for additional indexes
that you may want to search. External indexes are designated by their
database directory (ie: /home/someothergui/.recoll/xapiandb,
/usr/local/recollglobal/xapiandb).
Once entered, the indexes will appear in the All indexes list, and you can
chose which ones you want to use at any moment by transferring them
to/from the Active indexes list.
Your main database (the one the current configuration indexes to), is
always implicitly active. If this is not desirable, you can set up your
configuration so that it indexes, for example, an empty directory.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Chapter 4. Installation
4.1. Installing a prebuilt copy
Recoll binary installations are always linked statically to the xapian
libraries, and have no other dependencies. You will only have to check or
install supporting applications for the file types that you want to index
beyond text, HTML and mail files.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.1.1. Installing through a package system
If you use a BSD-type port system or a prebuilt package (RPM or other),
just follow the usual procedure, and maybe have a look at the
configuration section (but this may not be necessary for a quick test with
default parameters).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.1.2. Installing a prebuilt Recoll
The unpackaged binary versions 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). However, this
also means that you cannot change the versions which are used.
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.
You may then need to install external applications to process some file
types that you want indexed (ie: acrobat, postscript ...). See next
section.
Finally, you may want to have a look at the configuration section.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.2. Packages needed for external file types
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 dependencies. None is needed for building Recoll):
* PDF: pdftotext is part of the Xpdf package.
* Postscript: pstotext.
* MS Word: antiword.
* MS Excel and PowerPoint: catdoc.
* RTF: unrtf
* dvi: dvips
* djvu: DjVuLibre
* MP3: Recoll will use the id3info command from the id3lib package to
extract tag information. Without it, only the file names will be
indexed.
Text, HTML, mail folders and Openoffice files are processed internally.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.3. Building from source
4.3.1. Prerequisites
At the very least, you will need to download and install the xapian core
package (Recoll development currently uses version 0.9.5), and the qt
run-time and development packages (Recoll development currently uses
version 3.3.5, but any 3.3 version is probably OK).
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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4.3.2. Building
Recoll has been built on Linux (redhat7.3, mandriva 2005, Fedora Core 3),
FreeBSD and Solaris 8. If you build on another system, I would very much
welcome patches.
Depending on the qt configuration on your system, you may have to set the
QTDIR and QMAKESPECS variables in your environment:
* QTDIR should point to the directory above the one that holds the qt
include files (ie: qt.h).
* 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/.
The Recoll configure script does a better job of checking these variables
after release 1.1.1. Before this, unexplained errors will occur during
compilation if the environment is not set up. Also, for 1.1.0 the qmake
command should be in your PATH (later releases can also find it in
$QTDIR/bin).
Normal procedure:
cd recoll-xxx
configure
make
(practices usual hardship-repelling invocations)
There little auto-configuration. The configure script will mainly link one
of the system-specific files in the mk directory to mk/sysconf. If your
system is not known yet, it will tell you as much, and you may want to
manually copy and modify one of the existing files (the new file name
should be the output of uname -s).
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4.3.3. Installation
Either type make install or execute recollinstall prefix, in the root of
the source tree. This will copy the commands to prefix/bin and the sample
configuration files, scripts and other shared data to prefix/share/recoll.
If the installation prefix given to recollinstall is different from what
was specified when executing configure, you will have to set the
RECOLL_DATADIR environment variable to indicate where the shared data is
to be found.
You can then proceed to configuration.
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4.4. Configuration overview
There are two sets of configuration files. The system-wide files are kept
in a directory named like /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples, they define
default values for the system. A parallel set of files exists by default
in the .recoll directory in your home. This directory can be changed with
the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option parameter to
recoll and recollindex.
If the .recoll directory does not exist when recoll or recollindex are
started, it will be created with a set of empty configuration files.
recoll will give you a chance to edit the configuration file before
starting indexing. recollindex will proceed immediately.
Most of the parameters specific to the recoll GUI are set through the
Preferences menu and stored in the standard QT place ($HOME/.qt/recollrc).
You probably do not want to edit this by hand.
For other options, Recoll uses text configuration files. You will have to
edit them by hand for now (there is still some hope for a GUI
configuration tool in the future). 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.
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:
* Comment (starts with #) or empty.
* Parameter affectation (name = value).
* Section definition ([somedirname]).
Section lines allow redefining some parameters for a directory sub-tree.
Some of the parameters used for indexing are looked up hierarchically from
the more to the less specific. Not all parameters can be meaningfully
redefined, this is specified for each in the next section.
The tilde character (~) is expanded in file names to the name of the
user's home directory.
White space is used for separation inside lists. Elements with embedded
spaces can be quoted using double-quotes.
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4.4.1. 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.
Paramers:
topdirs
Specifies the list of directories or files to index (recursively
for directories). The indexer will not follow symbolic links
inside the indexed trees. If an entry in the topdirs list is a
symbolic link, indexing will not start and will generate an error.
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.
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:
*~ #* bin CVS Cache caughtspam tmp
The list can be redefined for sub-directories, but is only
actually changed for the top level ones in topdirs.
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,
mail 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.
loglevel
Verbosity level for recoll and recollindex. A value of 4 lists
quite a lot of debug/information messages. 2 only lists errors.
logfilename
Where the messages should go. 'stderr' can be used as a special
value, and is the default.
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.
indexstemminglanguages
A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be
built. See recollindex(1) 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.
guesscharset
Decide if we try to guess the character set of files if no
internal value is available (ie: for plain text files). This does
not work well in general, and should probably not be used.
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.
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.
idxabsmlen
Recoll stores an abstract for each indexed file inside the
database. This is so that they can be displayed inside the result
lists without decoding the original file. This parameter defines
the size of the stored abstract (which can come from an actual
section or just be the beginning of the text). The default value
is 250.
iconsdir
The name of the directory where recoll result list icons are
stored. You can change this if you want different images.
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4.4.2. 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 (avoids unnecessary decompressions or file
executions). This is partially redundant with skippedNames in the main
configuration file, with two differences: it will not affect directories,
and it can be changed for any sub-directory.
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4.4.3. The mimeconf file
mimeconf specifies how the different mime types are handled for indexing,
and for display.
Changing the indexing parameters is probably not a good idea except if you
are a Recoll developers.
You may want to adjust the external viewers defined in (ie: HTML is either
previewed internally or displayed using firefox, but you may prefer
mozilla, your openoffice.org program might be named oofice instead of
openoffice ...). Look for the [view] section.
You can also 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).
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dockes
