Full-text index and search in pdf's

Still very happy with PP!

But on my wishing list is the ability to index full-text pdf (like Zotero does), so that my search on a subject (eg. ice age landscapes) can be a lot more productive. The reason for this is that I have a lot of material without keywords and resumes, and hence i’m not able to find them when searching.

Maybe it could be implemented as an advanced search options?

(I know it’s already been asked for, but I would like to bring it up again)

Anyway thanks for a very useful app.
Troels

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We have plans to exploit the full text PDF search, which includes OCR for PDFs, Google Drive itself offers.

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Wonderful news - I have been waiting for this feature. Doing the search in google drive is a workaround, but in google drive there is no option to search only within a particular folder (such as the paperpile folder) making the results less useful in most cases for me.

I have been syncing the paperpile folder to my computer and then using recoll on linux to index the folder and do more useful advanced searches…a far more tedious approach, particularly since I’ve found I really don’t need the offline copy of the pdfs so I’m also wasting hard drive space

This will be a fantastic feature.

In case it’s useful to others, here’s what I do now: I keep Google Drive on my local computer always synced with the cloud. Then if I need to do full-text search, I use Windows search functionality in the Paperpile folder in the local Google Drive. Windows 10 does a great job of indexing all the documents — so the searches are instantaneous.

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Any estimate on when the full text search functionality might be available?

I too have really been enjoying PP because of the Google Docs integration, which for me, trumps any of the other advanced features I’m giving up. That said, the one feature I am really missing from Bookends is the ability to search my notes, highlights and tags. Without this feature, I often have to leave Gdocs and start randomly opening PDFs in PP looking for a highlight that I vaguely remember making. So far, I’ve resisted the urge to setup a sudo-sync between PDF and Bookends (or other), but I might have to.

Can’t help but wish that PP would partner with a mature desktop app such as Bookends. Seems like a better way to expand customer-base rather than trying to compete on every feature. (Then again, I’m no developer, and I don’t have insight into PPs business plan.)

Can’t wait to see what these new features look like.

Integrating notes and highlights into Paperpile and making them searchable is on our roadmap. Unfortunately, we first had to get the PDF viewer right. When we started, we desperately tried to find an existing solution on the market but none was good enough so we built it on our own.

We are very happy about this decision now, but it also means it delayed the features you are waiting for.

Partnering with a “mature desktop application” is not a realistic option for many reasons.

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Any update on enabling full-text and OCR search of library? I’m seriously considering leaving Mendeley because they have removed their mobile app but I’m reluctant to do so until Paperpile enables such functions.

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No updates yet, @Scott_Kerpen, except that this is very much a priority for us at the moment. As I mentioned via email, we expect to roll out a beta for advanced search features (along with some other updates) by end of year, so stay tuned!

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Hi everyone.
Just wanted to check on this feature.
Will it be implemented soon?
Thanks if it was answered somewhere already.

Welcome to our forum, @Adnan_Akcay! Many updates/changes for the webapp are already in beta (feel free to sign up); the ability to search full text from the library is not implemented in this version but will be soon. We expect to add most of the big missing features within the next couple months.

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