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


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Recoll

   This is Recoll, a personal full text indexing system.

   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.

   Recoll is still in infancy, but it is based on a very strong backend
   (Xapian), and I find it quite useful right now. You might be interested in
   using Recoll to index your home directory instead of using xapian's Omega,
   for example, if you do not want to run a web server, or your data is not
   iso-8859-1. But the query features are much less sophisticated for now.

   See INSTALL inside the distribution for compiling and installing, very
   much by hand for now, I hope things will get better in the near future.

  Features:

     * Document types: text, html, pdf (with xpdf's pdftotext), postscript
       (with ghostscript's pstotext), msword (with antiword), openoffice
       files, maildir and mailbox mail folders (mozilla and thunderbird mail
       ok). Deals with compressed versions of same.
     * Relatively 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. The idea is that EVERYBODY should index their files because
       it makes life easier.
     * An ugly GUI, qt-based, written with qt Designer.
     * 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 and Solaris
   (versions FreeBSD 5.3, red hat 7.3, Solaris 8, but other not too distant
   releases should be ok too).

  Things lacking, coming in the not too far future:

     * An interactive configuration tool. You need to edit files by hand for
       now.
     * Packages, rpm or other. It's all tar files currently.
     * A build system, autoconf et al.
     * Documentation and help.
     * A few more filters for less common file types.

   I very much welcome suggestions or (gasp) code

   In hope that this can be useful to somebody, it already is for me.

  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.

    jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr
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Using Recoll

  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

   Entering a capitalized word in any search field will prevent stem
   expansion (example: won't 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".

  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 a default 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 as the simple search.

    jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr