Indexing PDF files on Ubuntu

Question

I'm looking for a solution in Ubuntu that indexes PDF (and ps?) files for searching later.

The criteria would be:

1. Compatibility: Often extracting text varies, depending on what software was used to create the PDF. Some PDFs can also be "locked", which I guess one should respect.
2. Search functionality: wildcards, regex's, "fuzzy" matching.
3. Speed of search

In my case I want to index a folder of academic journal articles, hence the requirement that it works consistently regardless of what software created the PDF. I'm already using a reference manager so would rather not replace that.

For example: A good front-end to Beagle, and a plugin that allows it to index PDFs would be perfect.

Answer 1

Tracker does the same thing as Beagle and Strigi, but contrary to Beagle, it's written in pure C (Beagle is a Mono application). Allegedly, it is a lot faster than Beagle, though I haven't done the math myself.

I can't find you a link to Tracker, but I'm sure it's in the default Ubuntu repositories.

Answer 2

Lucene does fulltext indexing of PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word, and OpenDocument. It's just a library, but there are several applications/CMS using it, or you could use it as a base for your own solution.

It is free software (Apache license).

Edit:

If you are looking for something with a frontend, you might consider Beagle or Strigi:

Beagle

Strigi

Answer 3

I use google desktop for searching on linux. Not free, but it's the best i've found.