Release notes for Recoll 1.18.x

Caveats

Installing over an older version: 1.18 introduces serious index formats changes, and it will be advisable to reset the index in most cases. IF the 1.18 index is not configured for case and diacritics sensitivity, it is mostly compatible with 1.17 indexes though. Case/diacritics sensitivity can be turned off either by a compile flag or a configuration variable, and the default is still a stripped index (so, mostly compatible with 1.17). If you activate case and diacritics sensitivity, you must reset the index.

Always reset the index if installing over an older version (1.14 and older). The simplest way to do this is to quit all recoll programs and just delete the index directory (rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb), then start recoll or recollindex. recollindex -z will do the same in most cases.

Some new, auxiliary, features do require a full reindex to work:

• The file size filtering functions (for an index created by 1.16 or older).
• The anchored search feature if the index was created by release 1.15 or older.

Changes

Recoll 1.18 has some major changes 1.17, the most visible of which is the ability to consider character case and diacritics when searching.

Recoll 1.18.0 changes:

• The index can now be configured for case and diacritics sensitivity. Raw terms are indexed, and query time expansions are used when search insensitivity is designed (in a similar manner to what is used for stemming). See the chapter manual for details about controlling the feature.
• More effort is put in choosing the terms used in generating the snippets inside the result list.
• Capacity to store page breaks and use them when opening a document.
• Capacity to pass a search string to the native app.
• New "snippets" window for documents with page numbers, let the user choose a snippet and open the document at the appropriate page.
• We now use the Xapian "synonyms" mechanism to store all data about stemming, case, and diacritics expansion (this replace the previous ad-hoc stemming expansion mechanism).
• New script to start/stop recollindex according to mains power status.
• Add <pre style="white-space: pre-wrap"> to plain text HTML display options.
• Allow multiple directory specifications in the query language, as in: dir:/home/me -dir:tmp
• Improved search in the preview window, allows selecting one of the initial search clauses from a list.
• Fixed bugs:
  • The unac_except_trans mechanism could be buggy in some cases and generate wrong character translations.
  • Don't terminate monitor for permissions-related addwatch error.
  • Fix handling of ODF documents exported by Google docs.