I’m looking for a self hosted solution to this problem:
I want to create a full text search index from a collection of PDF manuals (text, not images, I don’t care about OCR here). There is a UI to search for text matches in documents, and clicking a search hit opens the PDF scrolled to where the search hit is (bonus points if the search hit is hilighted)
A very crude solution would be to merge all PDFs into a single file and just use the search of your favourite PDF viewer.
I haven’t used any of these, but I wonder if any of the self-hosted open source document management platforms would serve your purpose? Something like PaperMerge or similar?
Would paperless-ngx work?
Not sure if paperless could fit your need https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx#features
Paperless is great. But it does not highlight the search text. The android app paperless mobile does. Another option could be zotero. It is meant for sientific papers but very powerful in handling large PDF collections. Hard to completly selfhost. But using WebDAV as storage is straightforward. Good look, let us know where you land.
I’m using it with ocr and it does highlight the search text and scrolls to it.
U r right, it does highlight in the pdf. It did not on mobile for me.
That’s a very specific problem and I don’t know if there is an existing solution that does exactly what you want.
paperless-ngx does a lot of the things you ask for, it lets you upload pdfs, does OCR and gives you full text search via a web ui. It’s just not made specifically for manuals and it does not highlight the search hits or scrolls to them.
Does Nextcloud search PDF contents?
Not by default, but I am relatively sure that the full text search extension does.
So like self-hosted Spotlight? That would be cool
Or rather - FOSS Spotlight. I suppose it’s already self hosted
Elastic Search.
This sounds useful although I haven’t tried it myself: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40614824
Paperwork seems to fit most of the bill except for one thing: it won’t scroll to where the search hit is (but it will highlight the matching keywords).
Just beware Paperwork won’t just create an index. It’ll organize the PDF its own way in its own work directory.
(full disclosure: I’m its main dev)
Do you guys have a docker image or something that I could put on my homelab server?
I think there is some confusion here.
Paperwork is a desktop application, not a web application. (eh, self-hosting doesn’t necessarily always imply web applications ! :). I for one use Nextcloud and nextcloud-desktop to keep my Paperwork work directories in sync on all my computers.
How does Paperwork compare to Paperless?
Paperless is a web application. Paperwork is a desktop application.
This sounds like it could be a job for Calibre-web.
