Zotero and Google Desktop

richardfellows

Zotero's search capability is useful but it doesn't allow me to search associated word files or pdfs. To do this I use Google Desktop. The two are complementary and wonderful packages.
Is there any scope to modify Zotero to search documents in a similar way to Google Desktop, or could it ever make sense for Zotero to function as some form of "add-in" with Google Desktop so that the Zotero file could be searched by Goggle Desktop.
I fully accept that this question is so naive that it exposes me to intense ridicule by anyone who knows what they are talking about!
Thanks
Richard
(A grateful and deeply impressed user.)

dstillman

Zotero currently has experimental support for PDF fulltext indexing and searching using a PDF-to-text converter from a third-party project, and the upcoming RC1 release of 1.0 will add a UI to make it much easier to set up and use the PDF support.

We'd love to support indexing and searching of Word documents, but we haven't found a Word-to-text converter that is as lightweight and portable as the one we're using for PDFs. (If anyone knows of one, we'd appreciate any pointers.) The other alternative would be to develop a native Word reader that runs within Mozilla (via XPCOM, ideally in C++).

I'm not familiar with how Google Desktop works, so I'm not sure how feasible it is to integrate with it. If it's similar to OS X's Spotlight, it'd require creating individual indexable pointer files for each item that focused the item in Zotero when opened. This could be something we look into for a future release.

arggem

Another program that does this is Copernic Desktop Search 2

noksagt

antiword binaries are available for all platforms that firefox is official on & then some. scribus ships with it, I think.

wvware works everywhere, but you may have to roll your own binaries (abiword uses and maintains this library)

catdoc can be made to work in most places, but the windows, etc. binaries are all unofficial. Don't know apps that use it.

and the old standby of 'strings' will work if all you're doing is adding to a search index & don't care if there's random garbage that gets added to the index too.

sean

Thanks for the advice on utilities.

tshort

Just change your Zotero storage location to some location where Google desktop search or Copernic will index it, and you can just use those tools to search inside Zotero attachments.

fjbuch

google Desktop search claims to index all my fixed drives. Since Zotero is stored on the C drive under firefox profiles it should be indexed. However, I understand that the notes are not indexed.

Anyway, why would one need to change the storage location if the storage location is already on C? Or is Google Desktop not really indexing what is in the application data in a sqlite file.

Any further insights will be welcomed.

noksagt

Google Desktop excludes many directories on your drive, including the one that stores the Firefox profile by default (which is also the default storage directory for zotero).

nmschaller

What is the state of the art?

I understand that Google Desktop searches the attachments if the Zotero folder is located in a drive that is generally indexed.

Is there a plugin (indexation file) for Google Desktop available, so that Google Desktop does also index and search the content from the zotero.sqlite database?