DocFetcher Pro

DocFetcher Pro 1.19 is out. Besides various minor bugfixes and changes, this new release features GUI translations for 23 languages:

• Arabic (MSA)
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Danish
• Dutch
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Norwegian Bokmål
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Formerly, DocFetcher Pro was English-only and thus lagged behind the free DocFetcher in the GUI translation department. Now it has caught up with and surpassed DocFetcher, featuring 9 additional GUI translations. Moreover, it allows changing the GUI language in the preferences.

The user manual hasn’t been translated yet. This is currently in the works.

In related news, DocFetcher Pro now offers two new word segmentation options in the preferences, “Chinese” and “Japanese”. These need to be selected to get usable search results when dealing with Chinese and Japanese text, respectively.

As for bugfixes and changes, arguably the most noteworthy are:

1) The minimum/maximum file size filter had a bug where if you entered something like 5 MB, then closed and restarted the application, it would still display 5 MB, but internally use 5 KB, leading to incorrect search result filtering. Curiously, this bug has been around since the first version of DocFetcher Pro without anybody noticing and reporting it. – And it probably would’ve remained, had it not been for the massive GUI overhaul during the GUI translation.

2) Judging by the number of support emails, one part of the DocFetcher Pro GUI that is most poorly understood by users is the purpose of the Custom Types pane, and specifically the purpose of the “Other” checkbox in it. If you want to know how it works, please refer to the page “Custom Types” in the user manual. Suffice it to say here that if there are no checkboxes other than the “Other” checkbox in the Custom Types pane, and that checkbox is unticked, all search results are filtered out. The new DocFetcher Pro version detects this specific case and shows a helpful error message instead of just displaying no results, thereby putting this little bit of confusion to rest.

3) The indexing of filenames has been slightly improved. Now it works consistently regardless of whether or not whitespaces are used as separators in the filename.

For the full list of bugfixes and changes in this release, please see the changelog.

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DocFetcher Server 1.3 is out. This release comes with an assortment of bugfixes and two new features that could be considered quite important depending on your use case.

The first new feature is that the web interface can now be opened with a ?q= URL parameter to immediately run a search with the query specified via the URL parameter. Here’s an example of what the full URL to the web interface might look like: https://example.com/search/?q=dog cat

One use case for the new URL parameter is launching DocFetcher Server searches programmatically or from a terminal. Another use case is that you can now select some text on a website, and then with the help of a browser extension quickly initiate a DocFetcher Server search with the selected text as the query.

The second new feature is new path mapping facility. This addresses the following use case: Let’s say you have a DocFetcher Server instance running on a Linux server and indexing documents located or mounted at /path/to/documents. Furthermore, the clients connecting to the DocFetcher Server instance all happen to be running on Windows. The problem is that the indexed documents are also accessible to the clients, but at a completely different mount point, e.g., X:\docs, and for some reason or other the clients need to directly open the files under X:\docs, rather than download copies of them through the web interface. Handling this use case was not possible in previous DocFetcher Server versions, now it is. In the new version, you can configure the DocFetcher Server instance to modify file paths on their way to the clients so that for example /path/to/documents is seen by clients as X:\docs.

An important caveat here is that due to the fact that the web interface is forced to run in a browser sandbox, it is not capable of directly opening files under X:\docs with the client’s local viewer application (such as Microsoft Word). So the new DocFetcher Server version comes with an additional workaround to make the process of directly opening files less painful: You can now click the file icon of a result to copy the result’s file path to the clipboard. Afterwards, you can paste the copied file path into your file manager to open the file. (Note: The action to perform when clicking the file icon can be set in the Admin Area. The default action is to download the file, not to copy its path.)

As for bugfixes in the new DocFetcher Server version, perhaps the most notable ones concern the checkbox states in the Search Scope pane, the processing of PDF annotations, and RTF bodies of Outlook emails:

• As you probably know, to filter search results by location, you can tick and untick the checkboxes in the Search Scope pane in the bottom-left of the web interface. In previous versions, there was a major bug though: The checkbox states were reset after the associated index was updated or rebuilt on the server side. This became a noticeable problem if indexes were updated frequently.
• Previously, there were certain PDF annotations that were indexed and searchable, but not shown in the preview pane. Also, PDF annotations placed on empty pages were completely ignored.
• Previously, the RTF bodies of Outlook emails were completely ignored. Now they are properly indexed just like plain text and HTML email bodies.

For the full list of changes in this release, please see the changelog.

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DocFetcher Pro 1.18 is out. This release contains an assortment of bugfixes that accumulated since the previous release. The most notable bugfixes are:

• Previously, there were certain PDF annotations that were indexed and searchable, but not shown in the preview pane. Also, PDF annotations placed on empty pages were completely ignored.
• Previously, the RTF bodies of Outlook emails were completely ignored. Now they are properly indexed just like plain text and HTML email bodies.

For the full list of bugfixes in this release, please see the changelog.

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