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Searching through a bulk of pdf files (lemmy.ca)
submitted 11 months ago by Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I have a pile of part lists for tools I'm maintaining, in pdf format; and I'm looking for a good way to take a part number, search through the collection of pdfs, and output which files contain that number. Essentially letting me match random unknown part numbers to a tool in our fleet.

I'm pretty sure the majority of them are actual text you can select and copy+paste, so searching those shouldn't be too difficult; but I do know there's at least a couple in there that are just a string of jpgs packed in a pdf file. They will probably need OCR, but tbh I can probably live with skipping over those altogether.

I've been thinking of spinning up an instance of paperless-ngx and stuffing them all in there so I can let it index the contents including using OCR, then use it's search feature; but that also seems a tad overkill.

I'm wondering if you fine folks have any better ideas. What do you think?

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[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The OCR thing is it's own task but for just searching a string in PDFs, pdfgrep is very good.

pdfgrep -ri CoolNumber69 /path/to/folder

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That works magnificently. I added -l so it spits out a list of files instead of listing each matching line in each file, then set it up with an alias. Now I can ssh in from my phone and search the whole collection for any string with a single command.

Thanks again!

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 3 points 11 months ago

Glad to hear that!

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Interesting; that would be much simpler. I'll give that a shot in the morning, thanks!

[–] hoppolito@mander.xyz 11 points 11 months ago

In case you are already using ripgrep (rg) instead of grep, there is also ripgrep-all (rga) which lets you search through a whole bunch of files like PDFs quickly. And it's cached, so while the first indexing takes a moment any further search is lightning fast.

It supports a whole truckload of file types (pdf, odt, xlsx, tar.gz, mp4, and so on) but i mostly used it to quickly search through thousands of research papers. Takes around 5 minutes to index everything for my 4000 PDFs on the first run, then it's smooth sailing for any further searches from there.