[Xapian-discuss] Omindex Filters

[Charlie Hull]

Olly Betts wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 01:33:45PM +0100, James Aylett wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 09:59:16PM +0930, Frank J Bruzzaniti wrote:
>>
>>> I was wondering if it would be a bad idea to have a way to incorporate 
>>> plugins/filters in a way that would allow us to chop and change filters 
>>> without having to recompile and edit the source.
>> We've discussed this in the past, and certainly I'm in favour of
>> it.
> 
> Yes, it would be useful.
> 

We'd be very much in favour of this. We'd like to use the Omindex filter 
code for Flax, but currently it's all bound up in one file (omindex.cc) 
and thus we'd need to maintain a separate source file, which is messy.

We would also potentially be able to create some alternative filters for 
Xapian which used the Microsoft IFilter mechanism (included with most 
modern versions of Windows) - with these you can extract plain text from 
Office formats, PDFs and indeed a load of other formats. They aren't 
perfect by any means but they do generally have the advantage of being 
written by the owners of the original file format.

Cheers

Charlie