Reliability of full text search / indexing - how do I know?

bjohas
edited December 18, 2018
Hello all,
I've got a library where papers reference e.g. the string "RPL". I noticed that when I do an attachment search, some of those papers show up, some don't. The ones that don't have a .zotero-ft-unprocessed in the directory, the others have .zotero-ft-info/.zotero-ft-cache.

Basically, do I need to check Prefs>Search and see whether there are unindexed items, and then request those to be indexed? I.e. if I see "unindexed" I should run the indexing? If I see "partial" I should increase max. character count / max. page count?

Some more questions (sorry if I've not read the docs somewhere...):

- How do I know whether 'unindexed' refers to files that cannot be indexed? (E.g. because the PDF isn't readable...)

- Can I reindex a specific group library first?

- Is there a progress indicator for reindexing?

Thanks!
  • dstillman
    Basically, do I need to check Prefs>Search and see whether there are unindexed items, and then request those to be indexed?
    No. You don't need to do anything in that pane in normal usage.

    You shouldn't need to do anything other than have full-text content syncing enabled. Zotero will then index the .zotero-ft-unprocessed files in the background.
  • bjohas
    Ok, maybe it was just that they weren't indexed - I guess they are indexed locally, rather than syncd?

    Is there a way of telling whether indexing is going on?

    Many thanks!

  • Gurdas_Sandhu
    Dan, any known issues with full-text syncing? I have seen instances when I have indexed PDFs on one computer but they continue to appear unindexed on another computer. Lately, I have been re-indexing (the unindexed items) on each computer.
  • dstillman
    You shouldn't need to index anything manually. If there are .zotero-ft-unprocessed files, Zotero should start indexing them when the computer is idle for 30 seconds as long as full-text syncing is enabled. (Not that you should have to check, but in the debug output, you should see "Starting full-text content processor" and then it should start processing them.)

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