Xapian discuss - May 2006 - quick-and-dirty web search for a bunch of PDFs?

Hi all

I'm a newbie with Xapian. I have just a simple goal of creating a
quick-and-dirty web-based fulltext search for a bunch of PDF files that
I've collected from various conference CDs.

Is this a use-case that Omega covers, or do I need to use Xapian
directly? Where can I find some documentation about the capabilities of
Omega?

Assuming Omega doesn't do this, would it be reasonably straightforward
to attempt to write something using the python bindings? Has anyone done
a HOWTO for this pretty basic use-case? I presume I will need to provide
a PDF-to-text filter of some sort, eg poppler/xpdf or similar?

I'd really appreciate any suggestions you can giving getting started
here. Xapian looks really nice and I'm looking forward to using it.

Cheers
JP

-- 
John Pye
School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
The University of New South Wales
Sydney  NSW 2052  Australia
t +61 2 9385 5127
f +61 2 9663 1222
mailto:john.pye_AT_student_DOT_unsw.edu.au
http://pye.dyndns.org/

On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 05:16:55PM +1000, John Pye
wrote:
> I'm a newbie with Xapian. I have just a simple goal of creating a
> quick-and-dirty web-based fulltext search for a bunch of PDF files that
> I've collected from various conference CDs.
> 
> Is this a use-case that Omega covers, or do I need to use Xapian
> directly?
Omega's "omindex" indexer will index PDF files out of the box
(just make
sure you have pdftotext installed.)
> Where can I find some documentation about the capabilities of
> Omega?
In the docs subdirectory of the omega sources!  They get installed in
/usr/local/share/doc/omega by default, or probably something like
/usr/share/doc/xapian-omega if you installed from a package.

Cheers,
    Olly