search for: result&usg

Does anyone have experience with linux tools to parse the text from common non-text file formats for searching? I'm trying to use the kinosearch add-on for twiki which is fine as far as the search goes, but it takes forever to generate the index. It uses xpdf to extract strings from pdf's, antiword for .doc, and since it is perl, the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module for .xls. Some