Bug 160947

Summary: [RFE] New product to LibreOffice suite - Content file search tool
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Anton Shevtsov <shevtsov.anton>
Component: LibreOfficeAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX    
Severity: enhancement CC: libreoffice-ux-advise, mikekaganski, ooo, rb.henschel, shevtsov.anton, Tex2002ans+LibreOffice, vsfoote
Priority: medium Keywords: needsUXEval
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:

Description Anton Shevtsov 2024-05-06 07:11:37 UTC 
Hi, I have an idea to add another product to LibreOffice suite.

We are talking about a tool for searching the contents of office files. Search engine tool for content formats (doc, odt, rtf, pdf, txt, htm) using the LibreOffice engine (without preliminary indexing of files!).

Such a tool will be useful on different OSes. There are currently no such products (at least in Linux)
Comment 1 V Stuart Foote 2024-05-06 11:36:37 UTC 
Seems kind of non-performant, would require threaded parsing of document content from the various zip archive and binary files.

Also, this feature would require integration with os/DE file manager and native implementation per os/DE.

Seems a return to efforts of the 'Use LibreOffice Dialogs' internal file manager.
Comment 2 Regina Henschel 2024-05-06 12:03:29 UTC 
I think such tool need not be a core tool, but could be provided as extension or as separate tool. Perhaps contact Mechtilde Stehmann. She provides Loook, which is similar to such tool. https://mechtilde.de/Loook/index.html
Comment 3 Anton Shevtsov 2024-05-06 12:59:00 UTC 
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #2)
> I think such tool need not be a core tool, but could be provided as
> extension or as separate tool. Perhaps contact Mechtilde Stehmann. She
> provides Loook, which is similar to such tool.
> https://mechtilde.de/Loook/index.html

Loook for odt only. No pdf, no rtf, no htm...
Comment 4 V Stuart Foote 2024-05-06 13:06:39 UTC 
"Solutions" thus far, including the LO bundled native "Windows Explorer Extension" or the LOOOK extension, only parse ODF and OOXML source documents for full-text string contents.

This RFE for "non-indexed" search within the LO UI is much broader filter request and seems out of scope to project--even as an Extension
Comment 5 Heiko Tietze 2024-05-06 13:35:49 UTC 
pdfgrep does its job pretty well, and apparently there are also tools for ODF. And ultimately it's up to the OS/DE to search files for content. => WF
Comment 6 Tex2002ans 2024-05-07 01:49:58 UTC 
"Everything" is a program on Windows which has an extremely in-depth "search within all filetypes" functionality:

- https://www.voidtools.com/

I use that to mass search HTML, TXT, RTF, DOCX, ODT, ... all in one shot.

And, best of all, it's WAY faster than the default Windows Explorer search.