topic Re: Looking For PDF Search Program in Operating System - OpenVMS

Looking For PDF Search Program

Robert Atkinson — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 06:02:33 GMT

Does anyone know of a search engine/program that can find text in PDF files, and will run on VMS?

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Antoniov. — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 13:37:02 GMT

Search here
http://decwarch.free.fr/pspdf.html

Antonio Vigliotti

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Robert Atkinson — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 03:10:58 GMT

Antoniov - I hunted all through the Ghostscript sites, but couldn't find anything relating to a search facility.

I also hunted for an email address to pose the question, but still came up blank.

Could you point me in the right direction for either. I don't want to install such a large package if it doesn't suit my needs.

Cheers, Robert.

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Martin Vorlaender — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 09:05:04 GMT

Sorry for answering so late.

My port of ht://Dig to VMS can search PDFs. It uses pdftotext and pdfinfo from the xpdf package.

See http://www.pdv-systeme.de/users/martinv/htdig/

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Robert Atkinson — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 09:50:01 GMT

Martin - thanks for the links, all very usefull.

One question though; can HTDig search the PDF files without extracting the data?

If not, then it would be too cumbersome to use in my application.

Any other suggestions you can give to allow me to search a bunch of PDF files quickly would be very much appreciated.

Cheers, Robert.

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Martin Vorlaender — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 01:40:37 GMT

Robert,

sorry, but no. I know of no utility that searches PDF files "natively" on VMS, i.e. without extracting the text.

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

labadie_1 — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 02:09:11 GMT

Swish-E does it.

But as you are a subscriber of the Wasd mailing list, you already know that :-)

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Martin Vorlaender — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 02:29:40 GMT

No, it doesn't. Quoting from http://swish-e.org/current/docs/searchdoc.html :

"Swish-e can internally only parse HTML, XML and TXT (text) files by default"

Same philosophy as ht://Dig.

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Martin Vorlaender — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 02:31:35 GMT

Sorry, that link was bogus. Here is the correct one:
http://swish-e.org/current/docs/INSTALL.html#Creating_PDF_and_Postscript_documentation

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

labadie_1 — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 03:14:19 GMT

Sorry Martin, but I would tend to disagree, a post today in the Wasd mailing list explains how to do it.

And when you search in the Vms documentation at
http://pi-net.dyndns.org/cgiplus-bin/search

you find sometimes Pdf documents.

So it works

:-)

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Martin Vorlaender — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 03:17:13 GMT

I never said it couldn't.

But it does it the same way as ht://Dig does: by extracting the text portions inside the PDFs, and indexing those.

And as Robert indicated, that is not what he is looking for.

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Robert Atkinson — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 04:21:17 GMT

I'm afraid I'd have to agree with Martin on the one.

I've spent the morning reading the documentation on Swish, and although it can be largely automated, it does rely on first extracting the PDF to a text file (using PDFTOTEXT) and then running the index.

Rob.

Re: Looking For PDF Search Program

Martin P.J. Zinser — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:47:21 GMT

Hello Robert,

could you please give us some background why extracting the text and then searching that is not an acceptable solution and what exactly
you do expect this program to do?

Greetings, Martin

(You've already got the htdig Martin, now you have the Xpdf Martin too ;-)