Calibre Power Search Plugin
===========================
Version 2.2.0, released on 27 March 2022. Created by Michael Apozyan
Overview
--------
This plugin enables full-text search functionality to your electronic library. Default shortcut
key for Power Search dialog is Ctrl+Shift+S.
When you run Power Search, it extracts text from all your books on the fly and sends all text to
the full-text search engine. Plugin will never modify any books and records in Calibre library.
As a search backend, we are using ElasticSearch. Once the index is created and is up-to-date,
Power Search will be querying search engine and display list of books where certain search keywords
are found. For large libraries, running search for the first time might take a while. Subsequent
searches will normally take less than a second.
Requirements
------------
* ElasticSearch >= 6.x
In order to use Power Search Plugin, you need to have ElasticSearch service up and running.
For local setup, just download ElasticSearch package from the official website
https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch and unzip it in any folder.
If your system stays in trusted network (like your home network) and hence you are not much
concerned about fulltext data security, you may simplify configuring ElasticSearch by
disabling security module. Just go to config/elasticsearch.yml and add or modify following
configuration value:
xpack.security.enabled: false
* Pdftotext utility (optional)
Generally, Power Search Plugin is using Calibre's native converters to build full-text index.
However, native PDF conversion is sometimes working too slowly. To speed up this process, you
can install pdftotext utility and plugin will make use of it. Pdftotext is part of Xpdf and
Poppler projects.
Here are some hints:
- Xpdf package can be found here (look for "Xpdf command line tools")
https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html
- For Debian/Ubuntu, check for 'xpdf' or 'libpoppler' apt packages.
Configuring
-----------
* ElasticSearch engine network path
If you installed ElasticSearch locally, it will usually be available at http://localhost:9200/
so you don't need to modify this setting. However, you can change it if you need different
setup.
* ElasticSearch engine local path (optional)
Example: c:\programs\elasticsearch-7.8.1
If you plan to run ElasticSearch locally, PowerSearch might be set up to launch it in the
background when needed. Just point here to the home directory where ElasticSearch is located.
Note that in this case PowerSearch will also manage to stop ElasticSearch when you close
Calibre.
* Path to pdftotext tool (optional)
If pdftotext tool can not be found in PATH, enter the full path to pdftotext executable file.
* Number of parallel processes for text extraction
By default this number is equal to number of CPUs on your system minus one. You can change it
if neccessary.
* Index book formats
You can enable/disable specific book file formats that should be indexed.
* Automatically index new books on search
You can enable/disable an option of discovering new books and indexing them each time you run
the search.
Feedback
--------
For bug reports and feature requests please contact mapozyan (at) yahoo.com