tris/recoll
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Projects Releases Wiki Activity

*** empty log message ***

Browse Source
This commit is contained in:
dockes 2006-01-04 11:09:53 +00:00
parent 251c03e726
commit b0f02f0268
3 changed files with 788 additions and 0 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

32
src/doc/user/Makefile Normal file
View File

@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
#
# @(#$Id: Makefile,v 1.1 2006-01-04 11:09:53 dockes Exp $
#
#
MAINTAINER=jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr
DOC?= usermanual
LANGCODE?= en_US.ISO_8859-1
FORMATS?= html txt html-split
JADEFLAGS+= -V %generate-article-toc%
# The purpose for this is to replace the FreeBSD file which contains the
# blurb about file being hosted on FreeBSD.org. To work, it also
# needs a modification to /usr/share/doc/mk/doc.docbook.mk. Around line
# 121, replace LANGUAGECATALOG= with LANGUAGECATALOG?=
LANGUAGECATALOG=/usr/doc/share/sgml/catalog
#INSTALL_COMPRESSED?= gz
INSTALL_ONLY_COMPRESSED?=
#
# SRCS lists the individual SGML files that make up the document. Changes
# to any of these files will force a rebuild
#
# SGML content
SRCS= usermanual.sgml
# ${.CURDIR}/../../..
DOC_PREFIX?= /usr/doc
.include "${DOC_PREFIX}/share/mk/doc.project.mk"

160
src/doc/user/docbook.css Normal file
View File

@ -0,0 +1,160 @@
/*
* Copyright (c) 2001, 2003 The FreeBSD Documentation Project
* All rights reserved.
*
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
* are met:
* 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
* documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
*
* THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
* ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
* IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
* ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
* FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
* DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
* OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
* HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
* LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
* OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
* SUCH DAMAGE.
*
* $FreeBSD: doc/share/misc/docbook.css,v 1.7 2004/03/22 19:17:52 ceri Exp $
*/
BODY ADDRESS {
line-height: 1.3;
margin: .6em 0;
}
BODY BLOCKQUOTE {
margin-top: .75em;
line-height: 1.5;
margin-bottom: .75em;
}
HTML BODY {
margin: 1em 8% 1em 10%;
line-height: 1.2;
}
.LEGALNOTICE {
font-size: small;
font-variant: small-caps;
}
BODY DIV {
margin: 0;
}
DL {
margin: .8em 0;
line-height: 1.2;
}
BODY FORM {
margin: .6em 0;
}
H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6,
DIV.EXAMPLE P B,
.QUESTION,
DIV.TABLE P B,
DIV.PROCEDURE P B {
color: #990000;
}
BODY H1 {
margin: .8em 0 0 -4%;
line-height: 1.3;
}
BODY H2 {
margin: .8em 0 0 -4%;
line-height: 1.3;
}
BODY H3 {
margin: .8em 0 0 -3%;
line-height: 1.3;
}
BODY H4 {
margin: .8em 0 0 -3%;
line-height: 1.3;
}
BODY H5 {
margin: .8em 0 0 -2%;
line-height: 1.3;
}
BODY H6 {
margin: .8em 0 0 -1%;
line-height: 1.3;
}
BODY HR {
margin: .6em
}
BODY IMG.NAVHEADER {
margin: 0 0 0 -4%;
}
OL {
margin: 0 0 0 5%;
line-height: 1.2;
}
BODY PRE {
margin: .75em 0;
line-height: 1.0;
color: #461b7e;
}
BODY TD {
line-height: 1.2
}
BODY TH {
line-height: 1.2;
}
UL, BODY DIR, BODY MENU {
margin: 0 0 0 5%;
line-height: 1.2;
}
HTML {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
.FILENAME {
color: #007a00;
}
BODY H1, BODY H2, BODY H3, BODY H4, BODY H5, BODY H6 {
margin-left: 0
}
.GUIMENU, .GUIMENUITEM, .GUISUBMENU,
.GUILABEL, .INTERFACE, .GUIBUTTON,
.SHORTCUT, .SHORTCUT .KEYCAP {
background-color: #F0F0F0;
}
.ACCEL {
background-color: #F0F0F0;
text-decoration: underline;
}
.PROGRAMLISTING, .SCREEN {
margin-left: 3ex;
}

596
src/doc/user/usermanual.sgml Normal file
View File

@ -0,0 +1,596 @@
<!DOCTYPE BOOK PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//DTD DocBook V4.1-Based Extension//EN" [
<!ENTITY RCL "<application>Recoll</application>">
<!ENTITY XAP "<application>Xapian</application>">
]>
<book lang="en">
<bookinfo>
<title>Recoll user manual</title>
<author>
<firstname>Jean-Francois</firstname>
<surname>Dockes</surname>
<affiliation>
<address><email>jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr</email></address>
</affiliation>
</author>
<copyright>
<year>2005</year>
<holder role="mailto:jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr">Jean-Francois
Dockes</holder>
</copyright>
<releaseinfo>$Id: usermanual.sgml,v 1.1 2006-01-04 11:09:53 dockes Exp $</releaseinfo>
<abstract>
<para>The &RCL; user manual introduces full text search notions
and describes the installation and use of the &RCL; application.</para>
</abstract>
</bookinfo>
<chapter id="rcl.introduction">
<title>Introduction</title>
<sect1 id="rcl.introduction.tryit">
<title>Giving it a try</title>
<para>If you do not like reading manuals and would like to give
&RCL; a try, just perform <link
linkend="rcl.install">installation</link> and start the
<command>recoll</command> user interface, which will index your
home directory and let you search it right after.</para>
<para>Do not do this if your home has 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 <link
linkend="rcl.indexing.config">configuration file</link> first to
restrict the indexed area.</para>
<para>Also be aware that you will need to install the
appropriate supporting applications for document types that need
them (for example <application>antiword</application> for
ms-word files), and that the default character set used to read
raw text files for indexing is iso8859-1, which may not be
appropriate for you.</para>
<sect1 id="rcl.introduction.search">
<title>Full text search</title>
<para>Full text search applications allow you to 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 <emphasis>relevant</emphasis> documents will
appear first.</para>
<para>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.</para>
<para>This mode of operation has been made very familiar by www
search engines.</para>
<para>The notion of relevance is a difficult one, as only you, the
user, actually know which documents are relevant to your search,
and the application can only try a guess. The quality of this
guess is probably the most important element for a search
application.</para>
<para>In many cases, one is 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 <emphasis>stem</emphasis> (exemple: floor,
floors, floored, floorings...). &RCL; 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.</para>
<para>Stemming, by itself, does not provide for misspellings or
phonetic searches. &RCL; does not support these currently.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.introduction.recoll">
<title>Recoll overview</title>
<para>&RCL; is a full text search application which uses the
<ulink url="http://www.xapian.org">&XAP;</ulink> information retrieval
library as its storage and retrieval engine. &XAP; is a very
mature package using <ulink
url="http://www.xapian.org/docs/intro_ir.html">a sophisticated
probabilistic ranking model</ulink>. &RCL; provides the interface
to get data into (indexation) and out (searching) of the system.</para>
<para>In practice, &XAP; works by remembering where terms appear
in your document files. The acquisition process is called
indexation. </para>
<para>The resulting database can be big (roughly the size of the
original document set), but it is not a document archive. &RCL;
can only display documents that still exist at the place from which
they were indexed.</para>
<para>&RCL; stores all internal data in <application>Unicode
UTF-8</application> format, and it can index files with
different character sets, encodings, and languages into the same
database. It has input filters for many document types.</para>
<para>Stemming depends on the document language. &RCL; stores
the unstemmed versions of terms and uses auxiliary databases for
term expansion. It can switch stemming languages without reindexing.
Storing documents in different languages in the same
database is possible, and useful in practice, but does introduce
possibilities of confusion. &RCL; makes no attempt at automatic
language recognition.</para>
<para>&RCL; has many parameters which define exactly what to
index, and how to classify and decode the source
documents. These are kept in a <link
linkend="rcl.indexing.config">configuration file</link>. A
sample configuration is installed into the
<filename>.recoll</filename> subdirectory of your home
directory when you first execute a &RCL; command. The initial
configuration will index your home directory with default
parameters and should be sufficient for giving &RCL; a try,
but you may want to adjust it later.</para>
<para><link linkend="rcl.indexing.exec">Indexation</link> is started
automatically the first time you execute the
<command>recoll</command> search graphical user interface, or by
executing the <command>recollindex</command>.</para>
<para><link linkend="rcl.searching">Searches</link> are
performed inside the <command>recoll</command>
program, which has many options to help you find what you are
looking for.</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<chapter id="rcl.indexing">
<title>Indexation</title>
<sect1 id="rcl.indexing.introduction">
<title>Introduction</title>
<para>Indexation is the process by which the set of documents is
analyzed and the data entered into the database. &RCL; indexation
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 indexation command.</para>
<para>&RCL; indexation takes place at discrete times. There is no
currently no interface to real time file modification
monitors. The typical usage is to have a nightly indexation run
programmed into your <command>cron</command> file.</para>
<para>&RCL; knows about quite a few different document
types. The parameters for document types recognition and
processing are set in
<link linkend="rcl.indexing.config">configuration files</link>
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.
</para>
<para>Without further configuration, &RCL; will index all
appropriate files from your home directory, with a reasonable
set of defaults, if you live in western Europe or the USA. If
your normal character set is not iso8859-1, you almost certainly
need to adjust the configuration.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.indexing.config">
<title>The indexation configuration</title>
<para>The main configuration file is named
<filename>$HOME/.recoll/recoll.conf</filename> by default or
<filename>$RECOLL_CONFDIR/recoll.conf</filename> if
RECOLL_CONFDIR is set.</para>
<para>The most accurate documentation for editing the file is
given by comments inside the default file that will be created
when you first start <command>recoll</command>. If you want to
adjust the configuration before indexation, just click
<guilabel>Cancel</guilabel> when the program asks if it should
start initial indexation.</para>
<para>You can also have a look to the <link
linkend="rcl.install.config">configuration overview</link> inside
the installation chapter of this document.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.indexing.exec">
<title>Starting indexation</title>
<para>Indexation is performed either by the
<command>recollindex</command> program, or by the
indexation thread inside the <command>recoll</command>
program (use the <guimenu>File</guimenu> menu).
<para>If the <command>recoll</command> program finds no database
when it starts, it will automatically start indexation (except
if cancelled).</para>
<para>It is best to avoid interrupting the indexation process, as
this may sometimes leave the database in a bad state. This is
not a serious problem, as you then just need to clear
everything and restart the indexation. The database files are
normally stored in the <filename>$HOME/.recoll/xapiandb</filename>
directory,
which you can just delete if needed. Alternatively, you can
start <command>recollindex -z</command>, which will
reset the database before indexation.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.indexing.automat">
<title>Using <command>cron</command> to automate
indexation</title>
<para>The most common way to set up indexation is to have a cron
task execute it every night. For example the following
<filename>crontab</filename> entry would do it every day at
3:30AM (supposing <command>recollindex</command> is in your PATH):</para>
<programlisting>30 3 * * * recollindex > /tmp/recolltrace 2>&1</programlisting>
<para>The usual command to edit your
<filename>crontab</filename> is
<userinput>crontab -e</userinput> (which will usually start the
<command>vi</command> editor to edit the file). You may have
more sophisticated tools available on your system.</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<chapter id="rcl.searching">
<title>Searching</title>
<sect1 id="rcl.searching.simple">
<title>Simple search</title>
<para>Start the <command>recoll</command> program, then
enter search term(s) in the text field at the top left of the
window. Clicking the <guilabel>Search</guilabel> button or
hitting the <keycap>Enter</keycap> 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). You can
check the <guilabel>All terms</guilabel> checkbox to ensure
that only documents with all the terms will be returned. Use
the <guilabel>Tools</guilabel> / <guilabel>Advanced
search</guilabel> dialog for more complex searches.</para>
<para>After starting a search, a list of results will instantly
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
<filename>~/.recoll/mimeconf</filename> file to see how these
are configured).</para>
<para>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 <guilabel>Tools</guilabel>
/ <guilabel>Sort parameters</guilabel> dialog.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.searching.complex">
<title>Complex/advanced search</title>
<para>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).</para>
<para>It will let you search for documents of specific mime
types (ie: only <literal>text/plain</literal>, or
<literal>text/html</literal> or
<literal>application/pdf</literal> etc...)</para>
<para>It will let you restrict the search results to a subtree of
the indexed area.</para>
<para>In other respects, it works like the simple search.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.searching.history">
<title>Document history</title>
<para>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 <guilabel>Tools/</guilabel><guilabel>Doc History</guilabel> menu
entry.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.searching.tips">
<title>Search tips, shortcuts</title>
<formalpara><title>Disabling stem expansion</title>
<para>Entering a capitalized word in any search field will prevent
stem expansion (no search for
<literal>gardening</literal> if you enter
<literal>Garden</literal> instead of
<literal>garden</literal>). This is the only case where
character case will make a difference for a &RCL;
search.</para>
</formalpara>
<formalpara><title>Phrases</title>
<para>A phrase can be looked for by enclosing it in double
quotes. Example: <literal>"user manual"</literal> will look
only for occurrences of <literal>user</literal> immediately
followed by <literal>manual</literal>. You can use the
<guilabel>This exact phrase</guilabel> field of the advanced
search dialog to the same effect.</para>
</formalpara>
<formalpara><title>Quitting</title>
<para>Entering <keycap>^Q</keycap> almost anywhere will
close the application.</para>
</formalpara>
<formalpara><title>Closing previews</title>
<para>Entering <keycap>^W</keycap> in a preview tab will
close it (and, for the last tab, close the preview
window).</para>
</formalpara>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<chapter id="rcl.install">
<title>Installation</title>
<sect1 id="rcl.install.building">
<title>Building from source</title>
<sect2 id="rcl.install.building.prereqs">
<title>Prerequisites</title>
<para>At the very least, you will need to download and install the
<ulink url="http://www.xapian.org">xapian core
package</ulink> (&RCL; currently uses version 0.9.2), and the <ulink
url="http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/index.html">qt
runtime and development packages</ulink> (&RCL; currently uses
version 3.3.3).</para>
<para>You will most probably be able to find a binary package for
<application>qt</application> for your system. You may have to
compile <application>Xapian</application>,
but this is not difficult (if you are using
<application>FreeBSD</application>, there is a port).</para>
<para>You may also need
<ulink
url="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">libiconv</ulink>. &RCL;
currently uses version 1.9 (this should not be critical). On
<application>Linux</application> systems, the iconv interface
is part of libc and you should not need to do anything
special.</para>
<formalpara><title>External file types</title><para>&RCL; uses
external applications
to index some file types. You need to install them for the
file types that you wish to have indexed:</para>
</formalpara>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>MS Word: <ulink
url="http://www.winfield.demon.nl">
antiword</ulink>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem><para>PDF: pdftotext is part of the <ulink
url="http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/">Xpdf</ulink> package.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem><para>Postscript: <ulink
url="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/pstotext.htm">
pstotext</ulink>.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>RTF: <ulink
url="http://www.gnu.org/software/unrtf/unrtf.html">unrtf</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<sect2 id="rcl.install.building.build">
<title>Building</title>
<para>&RCL; has been built on
Linux (redhat7.3, mandriva 2005), FreeBSD and Solaris 8. If
you build on another system, <ulink
url="mailto:jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr">I would very
much welcome patches</ulink>.</para>
<para>Normal procedure:</para>
<screen>
<userinput>cd recoll-xxx</userinput>
<userinput>configure</userinput>
<userinput>make</userinput>
<userinput>(practises usual hardship-repelling invocations)</userinput>
</screen>
<para>There little autoconfiguration. The
<command>configure</command> script will mainly link one of
the system-specific files in the <filename>mk</filename>
directory to <filename>mk/sysconf</filename>. 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 <command>uname -s</command>).</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="rcl.install.building.install">
<title>Installation</title>
<para>Either type <userinput>make install</userinput> or execute
<userinput>recollinstall targetdir</userinput>, in the root
of the source tree. This will copy the commands to
<filename>$targetdir/bin</filename> and the sample
configuration files, scripts and other shared data to
<filename>$targetdir/share/recoll</filename>.</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.install.binary">
<title>Installing a prebuilt copy</title>
<sect2 id="rcl.install.binary.package">
<title>Installing through a package system</title>
<para>If you are lucky enough to be using a port system or a
prebuilt package (RPM or other), just follow the usual
procedure, and have a look at the <link
linkend="rcl.install.config">configuration
section</link>.</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="rcl.install.binary.rcl">
<title>Installing a prebuilt &RCL;</title>
<para>The unpackaged binary versions are just compressed tar
files of a build
tree, where only the useful parts were kept (executables and
sample configuration).</para>
<para>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.</para>
<para>After extracting the tar file, you can proceed with
<link
linkend="rcl.install.building.install">installation</link> as
if you had built the package from source.</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="rcl.install.config">
<title>Configuration overview</title>
<para>The personal configuration files and the database are kept in
the <filename>.recoll</filename> directory in your
home. If this directory does not exist when
<command>recoll</command> or
<command>recollindex</command> are started, the
directory will be created and the sample configuration files will
be copied. <command>recoll</command> will give you a
chance to edit the configuration file before starting
indexation. <command>recollindex</command> will
proceed immediately.</para>
<para>&RCL; 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
configuraton parameters is given by comments inside the sample
files, and we will just give a general overview here.</para>
<para>Most of the parameters specific to the
<command>recoll</command> GUI are set through the
<guilabel>Preferences</guilabel> menu and stored in the
standard QT place
(<filename>$HOME/.qt/recollrc</filename>). You probably do not
want to edit this by hand.</para>
<sect2 id="rcl.install.config.recollconf">
<title>Main configuration file</title>
<para><filename>~/.recoll/recoll.conf</filename> is the main
configuration file. It defines
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 character set can be
specified separately for any directory subtree.</para>
<para>The default configuration will index your home
directory. If this is not appropriate, use
<command>recoll</command> to copy the sample
configuration, click <guimenu>Cancel</guimenu>, and edit
the configuration file before restarting the command. This
will start the initial indexation, which may take some time.</para>
<para>There are also miscellaneous other parameters inside
<filename>recoll.conf</filename>. Explore and enjoy :)</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="rclinstall.config.mimemap">
<title>The mimemap file</title>
<para><filename>~/.recoll/mimemap</filename> specifies the
file name extension to mime type mappings.</para> <para>For
file names without an extension, or with an unknown one, the
system's <command>file -i</command> command will be executed
to determine the mime type (this can be switched off inside
the main configuration file).</para>
<para><filename>mimemap</filename> also has a list of
extensions which should be ignored totally (to avoid losing
time by executing <command>file</command>
for things that certainly should not be indexed).</para>
<para>The mappings can be specified on a per-subtree basis,
which may be useful in some cases. Example:
<application>gaim</application> logs have a
<filename>.txt</filename> extension but
should be handled specially, which is possible because they
are usually all located in one place.</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="rclinstall.config.mimeconf">
<title>The mimeconf file</title>
<para><filename>~/.recoll/mimeconf</filename> specifies how the
different mime types are handled for indexation, and for
display.</para>
<para>Changing the indexation parameters is probably not a
good idea except if you are a &RCL; developper.</para>
<para>You may want to adjust the external viewers defined in
(ie: html is either
previewed internally or displayed using
<application>firefox</application>, but you may prefer
<application>mozilla</application>...). Look for the
<literal>[view]</literal> section.</para>
<para>You can also change the icons which are displayed by
<command>recoll</command> in the result lists (the values are
the basenames of the png images inside the
<filename>iconsdir</filename> directory (specified in
<filename>recoll.conf</filename>).</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>
</chapter>
</book>