-sam

Thanks, maybe I can see how the go about storing their information so I can get idea for my own project.

Funny, that's exactly what I'm working on right now.
I'm using ocr too though. Making it so you can search terms, and it will return page number and where the document is. I'll have a release in a few weeks (open source). It's interface independent. But I'll include a cli and a CGI::Application front end.

If you think you know what you're doing- I wouldn't mind sharing my outline with you- I have some planning into it already.

The main point that may be very different for you- is that the archive I am dealing with will have at least 20k pdf files- and they are changing at all times. I expect my data to always be at most an hour old.. or so.. Once the system is fed and working.

Phil

I'd probably set up some type of conversion process (pdftotext) and then just grep those converted files.

the way too simplistic approach:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

die "usage: $0 <pdffile> <searchterm>"
  unless @ARGV == 2;

open( CMD, "/usr/bin/pdftotext $ARGV[0] - |" )
  || die "cannot open $ARGV[0]: $!";

while( <CMD> ) {
  print if( /$ARGV[1]/ );
}
[download]

Update: If I was going to do this for real and it needed to be web available, I would probably use Solr.