DocFetcher Pro

DocFetcher Pro 1.23 Release

2025-11-26T23:00:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.23 is out. This release comes with translations of the user manual and the app's readme, so that both now match the 24 languages supported by the GUI. In addition, an assortment of bugs has been fixed, including indexing crashes and text extraction issues related to Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook and EPUB.

For a list of changes in this release and previous releases, please see the changelog.

DocFetcher Pro 1.22 Release

2025-09-29T11:00:00+02:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.22 is out. This release comes with improved text extraction for PDF and Mobi files, and on macOS fixes a major issue: Now the app is signed and notarized, which means you will no longer see an "unidentified developer" error when trying to launch the app.

For a list of changes in this release and previous releases, please see the changelog.

DocFetcher Server 1.4 Release

2025-09-14T11:37:00+02:00

DocFetcher Server 1.4 is out. This release fixes a number of bugs and crashes, and on Windows now comes with digital signatures for all exe and dll files. This means that when running any of the application's executables, you will see either a Windows SmartScreen warning showing a "known publisher", or no Windows Smartscreen warning at all. The former case will occur in the beginning, since it takes some time for the signed files and the signing certificate to build reputation in Microsoft's reputation system.

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

DocFetcher Pro 1.21 Release

2025-09-12T21:48:00+02:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.21 is out. This release fixes a number of bugs and crashes, and on Windows now comes with digital signatures for all exe and dll files. This means that when running the installer or the application itself, you will see either a Windows SmartScreen warning showing a "known publisher", or no Windows Smartscreen warning at all. The former case will occur in the beginning, since it takes some time for the signed files and the signing certificate to build reputation in Microsoft's reputation system.

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

DocFetcher Pro 1.20 Release

2024-12-24T20:39:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.20 is out. This is an emergency bugfix addressing the following issues:

On macOS 15 Sequoia, the GUI was broken.
The application couldn’t be started if the system language didn’t match any of the languages into which the GUI was translated.
On macOS with right-to-left GUI layout (i.e., Arabic or Hebrew), the columns of the search result table were not right-to-left.

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

DocFetcher Pro 1.19 Release

2024-12-21T01:26:00+01:00

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:

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.
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.
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.

DocFetcher Server 1.3 Release

2023-08-06T18:27:00+02:00

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.

DocFetcher Pro 1.18 Release

2023-08-06T18:23:00+02:00

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.

DocFetcher Pro 1.17 Release

2022-12-22T15:33:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.17 is out. It's been a while since the previous release (about 9 months), mostly due to DocFetcher Server, and since then a number of bugfixes and a few small feature additions have accumulated. In total, 8 bugs and crashes were fixed, some related to indexing, some related to the Search Scope pane, and some related to the preview pane.

As for features, the new release allows setting a file size limit on the files to be indexed, e.g., "don't index files bigger than 500 MB". The significance of this size limit is that it greatly reduces the risk of the application running out of memory while trying to index enormous files. The other new features are a new "Copy With Path" entry in the context menu of the preview pane, and an encoding override setting for HTML files in the Advanced Settings file.

For a detailed listing of the bugfixes and features, please see the changelog.

DocFetcher Server 1.2 Release

2022-12-21T17:13:00+01:00

DocFetcher Server 1.2 is out. This release fixes two indexing-related crashes and a major bug concerning index updates. The bug, as explained in the changelog: If a subfolder within an indexed folder was renamed, moved or removed, the files in that subfolder were not properly updated in the index, causing obsolete files to show up in the search results along the current ones. The obsolete files will disappear once you upgrade to the new release and update all your indexes.

It appears that recently, an unknown number of emails sent to the official support email address (support .. docfetcherpro.com) were lost. They were likely blocked on their way through Google's servers for unknown reasons. If you sent an email to the support address and didn't get a response, that's why. Please resend your email to the address currently listed on the support page if your issue still persists. Apologies for the inconvenience!

DocFetcher Server 1.1 Release

2022-08-30T13:03:00+02:00

DocFetcher Server 1.1 is out. This releases is mostly a collection of usability improvements to round out some of the rough edges of the first release. Most items on the changelog are more or less significant, so in this release announcement there isn't really much to do except copy and paste the entire changelog:

The application could not be run on older Linux distributions due to a glibc compatibility issue. It now runs on Linux distributions with glibc 2.17 or newer.
Among the indexing settings, there's now a new setting for skipping content indexing for all files that are bigger than a certain maximum file size. The filenames of these files can still be indexed. With this new setting, it's now possible to skip large files that may cause the application to run out of memory during indexing.
In the Admin Area in the indexes table, there's a new column "Visible". By ticking and unticking the checkboxes in that column, you can control which indexes are transmitted to the clients, and which indexes are kept only on the server side. This is useful if you have some very large and rarely used indexes; keeping them on the server side when they're not needed will make the web interface load faster.
In the result table, you can now press the arrow-up and arrow-down keys to navigate to the previous or next result, with the contents of the preview pane updated accordingly. However, for this to work properly, you need to turn off "Automatically scroll to first match in preview pane" in the user preferences.
For tablet users, there's now a button above the result table for downloading the first selected result. Before, downloading results was only possible via the result table's context menu, which is difficult to open on tablets.
For technical reasons, the users that are counted towards the application's client limit are identified by browser session rather than by IP address. Among other things, this means accessing the web interface from multiple browsers on the same computer counts as multiple clients rather than as a single client. For some users, this can be quite inconvenient. In addition, it was also inconvenient for a single user to switch between different computers. For these use cases, there's now a workaround called "session stealing", which means that when the client limit is reached, new users may take over existing sessions, thus kicking their previous owners out of the web interface. The intended use is for users to kick "themselves" out in order to more easily switch between browsers and/or computers. For instances of DocFetcher Server with a client limit greater than 1, session stealing is off by default and must be enabled in the Admin Area on the Access tab.
It's now possible to inject custom CSS and JavaScript into the web interface, on the server side, via the files misc/custom.css and misc/custom.js. Note that no support or HTML stability guarantees for such customizations is provided, as explained in the comments in the custom.css and custom.js files.

DocFetcher Server 1.0 Release

2022-07-30T16:00:00+02:00

After over a year of development, DocFetcher Server 1.0 is now finally out!

For those not in the know, DocFetcher Server is a cousin of DocFetcher and DocFetcher Pro, featuring a proper implementation of the long-requested multi-user and remote-access support that is poorly implemented in DocFetcher and unavailable in DocFetcher Pro.

In essence, DocFetcher Server is a background process that runs on a server computer, indexes files on that computer, and makes those files searchable and downloadable for one or more clients through their web browsers. Typically, you'd want to deploy this kind of software on a server machine in a private or company network, or deploy it on a rented server machine for remote access to your files. Accordingly, DocFetcher Server is geared more towards businesses than individuals, and this combined with the substantially more complex server technology under the hood is why the software is situated at a higher price range than DocFetcher Pro.

During the first 3 weeks after launch, until August 21, 2022, DocFetcher Server will be available at a reduced price (15% off). This will hopefully compensate for any early-release bugs. If you do find any bugs, please help getting them fixed by reporting them to Support.

To be sure, development of DocFetcher Server took much longer than initially expected. Like, how hard can it be to build a web UI on top of the existing DocFetcher Pro core? --- Well, turns out, very hard, for two reasons: First, the existing desktop UI turned out to be a lot bigger and deeper than expected, and taking it to the web revealed all kinds of hidden features that took a considerable amount of time to reimplement. And second, designing a web UI turned out to be not only considerably more complex than, but also vastly different from designing a desktop UI, so that in the end very little existing UI code could be reused. --- You may not realize this, but a web UI is basically an HTML page pretending to be a user interface. Naturally, all kinds of hacks are involved to make this happen.

Unfortunately, because of these difficulties, DocFetcher Server currently lacks some of the more advanced and/or less frequently used features of DocFetcher Pro, notably the ability to load and save indexing settings, CSV export of search results and indexing errors, and the file size and Custom Types filters. For a complete list of missing features, see this page. --- Reimplementing all of these would probably have added three months or more to the development process, and the madness had to stop somewhere.

Speaking of the past, DocFetcher Server was formerly announced as "DocFetcher Pro Server", but in the end the "Pro" was dropped for the sake of brevity. It's still "Pro" software though, even more so than DocFetcher Pro!

So, now that DocFetcher Server is out, what about the future of the DocFetcher project? Of course, there are plans for DocFetcher Pro 2.0 and DocFetcher Server 2.0, but no, don't expect them to come out in the near future. The thing is, the DocFetcher project has been on a development sprint for over two years now (since early 2020), producing as results DocFetcher Pro, a major bugfix release of DocFetcher, and DocFetcher Server. During this sprint, cleanup and maintenance activities were mostly left by the wayside, and this is not sustainable in the long run.

Consequently, the DocFetcher project will now enter a prolonged cleanup and maintenance phase, which will probably produce very little in terms of visible, flashy results, but will produce a lot of internal changes that contribute significantly to the long-term future of the project. To give just two concrete examples:

Since the very beginning, before 2007, DocFetcher has been developed in a development environment known as the Eclipse IDE. Unfortunately, the latter has fallen out of favor with the development community for some time now, and some vital tools needed to develop DocFetcher are no longer being updated. That's why the DocFetcher project sooner or later needs to get off that sinking ship and migrate to a new development environment. On that occasion, the currently used programming language Scala needs to be upgraded from the aging Scala 2 to the new Scala 3 as well. All this takes a lot of work and will produce exactly zero new features.
DocFetcher Pro and DocFetcher Server will be equipped with so-called "unit tests", which is programming jargon for automated testing of the software. Among other things, unit tests serve as a safeguard against new major features and changes breaking existing functionality. --- That's just what's needed when new major features and changes finally get implemented for DocFetcher Pro 2.0 and DocFetcher Server 2.0. Unit tests themselves produce exactly zero new features, unfortunately, but they support the addition of new features down the road.

So, hopefully, DocFetcher Server 1.0 was worth the long wait, for those who were waiting, and hopefully whatever big thing comes next will be worth the wait too. Until then, you can expect to see some more bugfixing in DocFetcher, DocFetcher Pro and DocFetcher Server.

On a final note, until now everyone who bought DocFetcher Pro was automatically subscribed to the DocFetcher Pro newsletter. With the arrival of DocFetcher Server, this has to change a little: The DocFetcher Pro newsletter will cover both DocFetcher Pro and DocFetcher Server news, but if you bought only one of them, you will only receive the subset of the newsletter that pertains to the product you bought. If you want the full newsletter instead, you have to subscribe manually on the Subscribe page. This news article right here will be the first and last article about a DocFetcher Server release that DocFetcher Pro users will receive, unless they subscribe to the full newsletter.

DocFetcher Pro 1.16 Release

2022-03-15T17:28:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.16 has just been released. A crash related to RAR archives was fixed, and in the result table the date display in the "Last Modified" column was changed to a fixed "yyyy-MM-dd, HH:mm" format. This format no longer depends on the system locale.

As for DocFetcher Pro Server, the upcoming search server based on DocFetcher Pro, the release timeframe needs to be pushed back again, unfortunately. It will not be ready by the end of Q1 2022, and is now tentatively scheduled for Q2 or Q3 2022. The delay this time was mostly due to a single major distraction: Having to relocate to another country for personal reasons. This caused development to go off the rails for a while. Since then, things have quieted down again and the project is back on track.

Moreover, the release estimate of Q2 or Q3 is now a little more conservative, as development of DocFetcher Pro Server turned out to be a huge undertaking that basically requires rewriting half the code base. To be more specific, in order to transform DocFetcher Pro, a traditional desktop application, into a proper web application, the entire user interface needs to be swapped out and rewritten.

At present, DocFetcher Pro Server is in an early alpha stage and contains all the basic features, but still suffers from too many holes and problems to be ready for real-world use. This is now what remains to be tackled before the software can be released.

DocFetcher Pro 1.15 Release

2021-11-09T13:40:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.15 has just been released. This is just a minor maintenance release with fixes for three bugs: Two crashes related to tar.gz and 7z archives, respectively, and one minor issue with the preview pane. For details, please see the changelog.

There hasn't been much activity on DocFetcher Pro lately, mainly because of the focus on the upcoming DocFetcher Pro Server. Another reason is that most bugs in DocFetcher Pro seem to have already been fixed.

For those not in the know, DocFetcher Pro Server is a variant of DocFetcher Pro that is intended to be run as an indexing and search server, and that can be accessed by one or more clients remotely through the web browser.

Regarding the release date of DocFetcher Pro Server, there's bad news, unfortunately: It will likely not be ready by the end of 2021, as previously announced. The release is now tentatively scheduled for Q1 2022. There isn't any single big reason why this happened, just many small reasons that accumulated and conspired to cause DocFetcher Pro Server to fall behind schedule. That being said, the project continues to trot along at a steady pace.

As to the current state of DocFetcher Pro Server, there's now a working prototype that runs on all supported platforms, i.e., Windows, Linux and macOS. Searching, filtering by file location and the preview pane all work. However, there are also many important gaps that still need to be filled --- e.g., a login screen with accompanying user and password management, so you can access your search server over the internet without giving everybody else on the internet access to the server as well.

DocFetcher Pro 1.14 Release

2021-07-29T22:44:00+02:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.14 has just been released. It's been about two months since the previous release, and since then a grab bag of fixes and changes had accumulated. All in all, three bugs have been fixed, and the various changes mostly revolve around preventing more bugs and crashes. The most notable changes are as follows:

It turns out that some programs, such as Thunderbird, like using files without file extension as gigantic data dumps, e.g., "Trash" or "Trash-1". These files can often be 1 GB or more in size. However, DocFetcher Pro will by default try to index files without file extension as plain text files, and will likely fall over and die if it runs into these gigantic files. To prevent this, there's now a new setting on the indexing dialog that by default will make the program exclude files having no file extension and being bigger than a certain file size from indexing. (And if you're wondering why this new file size limit is applied only to files without file extension, and not to all files, that's because a reasonable value for the file size limit depends on the file type. For instance, Excel files may reasonably be capped at, say, 100 MB, while PST files should be allowed to be 2 GB in size or more. A file-type-dependent file size limit may be added in a future major release.)
In case of a fatal indexing crash, the program now reports the path of the last file it worked on. This helps locate the file that likely caused the crash.
Previously, indexes that could not be loaded due to a broken tree.xml file in them were silently ignored. Now such index loading failures will be reported at startup. This helps you with identifying and removing broken indexes that are uselessly occupying disk space.
Result table: For emails, the value in the size column now includes not only the email body size, but also the size of any attachments. Note that you must rebuild your indexes before this new size value is displayed.

For the full list of fixes and changes, please see the changelog.

DocFetcher Pro 1.13 Release

2021-05-31T21:00:00+02:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.13 has just been released.

The bundled Java runtime has been downgraded from Java 16 to Java 11 due to some reports of stability issues. --- Apparently, it's unwise to live on the bleeding edge of Java technology. The downgrade has virtually no impact on performance: In the previously discussed benchmark, going from Java 16 to Java 11 results in only about 100 ms of additional index loading time.

In addition to the Java runtime downgrade, this release fixes a handful of crashes and some other issues. For details, see the changelog.

DocFetcher Pro 1.12 Release: Java Downgrade

2021-05-26T15:42:00+02:00

Yesterday's release of DocFetcher Pro 1.12 brought an upgrade of the bundled Java runtime from Java 8 to Java 16. Since then, there have been reports of macOS users being unable to launch the new 1.12 release, specifically users running macOS 11.3 and 11.4.

The likely reason for this launch issue is an incompatibility between the latest macOS versions and Java 16, and downgrading to Java 11 seems to resolve the problem. Therefore, the DocFetcher Pro 1.12 release files for macOS have been replaced on Gumroad. They have the same filenames as before, but now come bundled with Java 11. Give these new files a try if you experienced the 1.12 launch issue. The release files for Windows and Linux remain unchanged, if you've bought any of those.

In terms of performance, there's virtually no difference between Java 11 and Java 16. Specifically, these are the measured index loading times with the benchmark from the previous post:

DocFetcher Pro 1.11 + Java 8: 63.048 s (100%)
DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 8: 15.316 s (24%)
DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 11: 8.824 s (14%)
DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 16: 8.726 s (14%)

As you can see from the figures, the downgrade from Java 16 to Java 11 results in an increase of index loading time by a measly 100 ms, which may very well be a statistical fluke. As before, all load times are averages over 10 test runs each.

DocFetcher Pro 1.12 Release

2021-05-25T13:17:00+02:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.12 has just been released. This release fixes a 7z- and a tar-archive-related crash, and brings dramatic performance improvements with respect to the handling of large indexes. The performance improvements were implemented partly in response to user feedback, and partly in preparation for the upcoming DocFetcher Pro Server, which will likely have to deal with much larger data sets than the current non-server version.

For some context: DocFetcher Pro is a full rewrite of the original DocFetcher, so under the hood they are actually two completely different programs. During the rewrite, the emphasis was on correctness and long-term maintainability, while performance was less of a concern. As a result, DocFetcher Pro used to be, up until now, generally slower than DocFetcher, although this difference in performance was not noticeable until you tried to index hundreds of thousands of files. When you did index that much data, the program would exhibit various kinds of slowness: It took forever to load indexes during startup, exiting the program became slow, and checking and unchecking folders in the Search Scope pane also became slow.

In the new 1.12 release, these performance issues were addressed with a major restructuring of some performance-critical code sections, numerous smaller code optimizations here and there, and an upgrade of the bundled Java runtime from Java 8 to Java 16. In a benchmark with an index comprising about 2.8 million files, these changes led to dramatic performance improvements, notably a reduction of index loading time from 63.048 s down to 8.726 s, which is a reduction down to about 14%, or 1/6. (Note: The two loading times are averages over 10 test runs each.) Other index-related operations are now also significantly faster.

DocFetcher Pro 1.11 Release

2021-05-15T18:38:00+02:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.11 has just been released. The previously announced 7z v0.4 support is now implemented, meaning DocFetcher Pro can now read 7z archives created with the latest versions of 7-Zip.

In addition to 7z v0.4 support, an Outlook indexing crash has been fixed, and a --disable-auto-index-update launch parameter has been added. For details, see the changelog.

Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with DocFetcher Pro's lack of a global hotkey, which in the Windows and Linux versions of DocFetcher can be pressed to bring the program window to the front. In DocFetcher Pro, this is in fact also possible, with the help of additional software. For details, see the question "Can you bring back the global hotkey from DocFetcher?" on the DocFetcher Pro FAQ.

With last week's release of DocFetcher 1.1.24 and the addition of 7z v0.4 support, the next major item on the development agenda is now DocFetcher Pro Server. As stated before, this will be a huge undertaking, so it's going to take quite a while, and furthermore, no reliable release date can be given at this time. That being said, it will probably be finished before the year is over.

DocFetcher Pro 1.10 Release

2021-04-12T11:58:00+02:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.10 has just been released. This time, two problems were fixed: First, performance issues and a crash related to the preview pane line numbers that were introduced in the previous 1.9 release. And second, with type-ahead search enabled, phrase search and proximity search worked incorrectly when combined with wildcards. For details, see the changelog.

The development agenda posted earlier still applies.

DocFetcher Pro 1.9 Release

2021-03-29T16:27:00+02:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.9 has just been released. There's good news for people working with plain text files in general, and source code in particular: DocFetcher Pro now shows line numbers when displaying plain text files in the preview pane. This feature was ported from a code contribution to the upcoming DocFetcher 1.1.23 release.

In addition to the new line numbers feature, an indexing crash was fixed, and a small index optimization step that is run after each index update was added. For details, see the changelog.

DocFetcher Pro 1.8 Release

2021-03-18T15:21:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.8 has just been released.

The one big news item for this release is that the program finally runs on macOS, specifically on macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) and later. For those who have used the free DocFetcher on macOS before, a notable improvement of DocFetcher Pro on macOS is that the latter comes with the DocFetcher Pro daemon, the small companion of DocFetcher Pro that provides automatic index updating while the main program isn't running. Please note that on macOS, the daemon needs to be manually added to the startup apps (also known as Login Items). How this is done is explained on the page "Daemon Setup" in the user manual.

For Windows and Linux users, this 1.8 release brings a critical Outlook-related bugfix (email bodies were no longer indexed) and two minor improvements, as explained on the changelog.

The next items on the development agenda are:

a long-overdue bugfix release for the free DocFetcher (v1.1.23)
support for the v0.4 format of 7z archives
DocFetcher Pro Server, a variant of DocFetcher Pro with multi-user support

As stated in the previous post, due to the complexity of the above items it’s hard to give any reliable release date estimates, but hopefully they will all be completed in 2021.

On the planned 7z v0.4 support: DocFetcher Pro inherited its 7z support from DocFetcher, so currently they both support 7z archives up to v0.3 of the 7z format. However, the recent versions of 7-zip create 7z archives in the v0.4 format, so those archives cannot be read by DocFetcher and DocFetcher Pro. That's kind of a big deal, considering the relative popularity of 7z archives. Adding v0.4 support in DocFetcher Pro requires completely rewriting the 7z handling, so this is going to be a major item on the development agenda.

DocFetcher Pro 1.7 Release

2021-02-27T12:28:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.7 has just been released. Two indexing-related crashes and one search-related crash were fixed. See the changelog for details.

DocFetcher Pro now comes with a proper user manual, replacing the one copied from the free DocFetcher. With the inclusion of the new user manual, the beta phase has now officially ended. As a consequence, bugfixes and the accompanying announcements will be released at a slower pace, so as to free up developer time for the upcoming items on the agenda:

a macOS release of DocFetcher Pro
a long-overdue bugfix release for the free DocFetcher (v1.1.23)
DocFetcher Pro Server, a variant of DocFetcher Pro with multi-user support

Due to the complexity of the above items, it's hard to give any reliable release date estimates, but hopefully they will all be completed in 2021.

DocFetcher Pro 1.6 Release

2021-02-16T22:23:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.6 has just been released. The DocFetcher Pro daemon is now fully functional, and two indexing issues were fixed. One of the two issues concerns the indexing of HTML files, the other was an IOException crash due to files with very long filenames. For details, see the changelog.

As for the DocFetcher Pro daemon: If you didn't know, the daemon's purpose is to work together with DocFetcher Pro to ensure that your indexes are always in sync with your indexed files. Specifically, here's how it works:

DocFetcher Pro is capable of monitoring your indexed folders for any file changes, and will automatically update your indexes when such file changes occur, assuming you haven't turned off automatic index updates.
Of course, when DocFetcher Pro isn't running, it can't monitor your indexed folders, so any file changes occurring during that time will be missed. This gap is filled by the DocFetcher Pro daemon. It becomes active when DocFetcher Pro isn't running, and by itself it doesn't do any indexing, it just records detected file changes so that the next time DocFetcher Pro is started, the latter will know which indexes need to be updated.

If you install DocFetcher Pro via the Windows installer, the daemon will be installed automatically. In all other versions of DocFetcher Pro, you will have to manually add the daemon executable to your startup applications.

DocFetcher Pro 1.5 Release

2021-02-08T09:37:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.5 has just been released. This release fixes some issues with type-ahead search, an Outlook indexing crash, and a problem with invalid characters in filenames that caused indexes to silently disappear from the Search Scope pane. For details, see the changelog.

DocFetcher Pro 1.4 Release

2021-02-02T12:57:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.4 has just been released. This week's release comes with two minor bugfixes and a couple of changes to smooth out a few usability wrinkles, such as the program's "success" sound no longer playing in the background every time you modify some indexed files. For details, see the changelog.

DocFetcher Pro 1.3 Release

2021-01-25T13:29:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.3 has just been released. The initial flurry of bug reports seems to be dying down, so this release includes only two bugfixes:

Fixed IndexNotFoundException crash caused by broken index.
Fixed PSTException crash during indexing of Outlook files.

See the changelog for an overview of past changes …

DocFetcher Pro 1.2 Release

2021-01-18T21:55:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.2 has just been released. Several bugs were fixed:

RTF files couldn't be indexed.
Two indexing-related crashes.
Sorting the results by last-modification time didn't work.

For details, see the changelog page.

More importantly, sometimes emails sent to Support did not go through due to issues with the mail server. If you sent an email to support and didn't get a reply, that was the likely reason. The server issue should be fixed now, but just in case, there's now also a fallback email address on the support page.

Finally, a little tip for users of the portable version of DocFetcher Pro: How to upgrade to the new version without losing your settings and indexes is explained on the FAQ page, under the question "When upgrading portable DocFetcher Pro, how can I keep my settings and indexes?".

DocFetcher Pro 1.1 Release

2021-01-13T18:13:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.1 has just been released. This is an emergency bugfix release for some critical issues:

The indexing process gets stuck on certain mobi files.
On Windows, the text preview highlighting did not work correctly with multi-page documents, such as PDF files.

These issues and a few others are explained in greater detail in the changelog.

DocFetcher Pro 1.0 Release

2021-01-09T17:31:00+01:00

DocFetcher Pro 1.0 has just been released, so now it's official: The open-source DocFetcher has gone into retirement, and from here on its commercial big brother on steroids DocFetcher Pro will take over.

DocFetcher will continue to receive bugfixes and be supported through funding from DocFetcher Pro, but new features will only be implemented in DocFetcher Pro, perhaps with a few exceptions here and there.

If you're familiar with DocFetcher, please see the Going Pro page and its subpages for an overview of the numerous improvements DocFetcher Pro has to offer over DocFetcher. If you're new to DocFetcher, you may find the About page and the Features page more helpful. In either case, you may want to check out the free demo of DocFetcher Pro.

The previously posted release schedule still applies. In addition, at some point in the future DocFetcher Pro will probably have its own forum, bug tracker and/or feature tracker somewhere on this site. Until then, if you have anything to say, write an email to Support or post on this thread in the DocFetcher forum.

Thanks for reading, stay home if you can, and don't let the virus eat you!

Pre-release Announcement

2020-11-02T14:41:00+01:00

Note: The following was originally posted over on the DocFetcher wiki when this site here wasn't up yet. The post is a pre-release announcement of DocFetcher Pro and gives some insight into the history of DocFetcher and DocFetcher Pro.

About

This page is an announcement of the upcoming commercial version of DocFetcher, called DocFetcher Pro, with some explanation of the past, current state and planned future of the DocFetcher project.

Past, Present and Future of the DocFetcher Project

A commercial version of DocFetcher, called DocFetcher Pro, is expected to be released soon, in multiple steps starting by the end of 2020 or in early 2021. As the name indicates, DocFetcher Pro is essentially DocFetcher with various “Pro” features, intended for those who need the new features and are willing to pay for them --- and who thereby also help keep the project going.

First, some background: DocFetcher started in 2007 as an open-source hobby project, and since then it has grown so much in complexity as well as in number of users that it is no longer possible to sustain it in a hobbyist fashion. Additionally, the code base, last revamped in 2010, is now ancient by digital standards, making it laborious and error-prone to fix bugs and implement new features. Hence DocFetcher Pro.

For the upcoming DocFetcher Pro, the code was completely rewritten in order to fix some notorious bugs that are nearly impossible to fix in DocFetcher, to prevent new bugs, and to facilitate the implementation of new features. For instance, thanks to the new code, DocFetcher Pro will finally be able to find folder names, a feature that has been requested for a long time.

However, due to the new code base, porting new features from DocFetcher Pro back to DocFetcher is a non-trivial task in most cases. That, and DocFetcher's ancient code base, are the main reasons why no new features are planned for DocFetcher. There may be a few exceptions here and there, but for the most part, all the new features will go to DocFetcher Pro.

Now, to be clear: The original DocFetcher won't be “dead” or “discontinued” in the sense that all development will cease, as it will still keep getting bugfixes and some polishing, funded via DocFetcher Pro. Instead, the original DocFetcher will become legacy software that will be maintained and supported indefinitely, and that will forever stick around as the free, “basic” alternative to the commercial, higher-powered DocFetcher Pro.

So, to conclude, if you've been using DocFetcher for a while now and are quite satisfied with what it has to offer, then there's no problem: You can just keep using it for free, and maybe grab an occasional bugfix release every now and then. On the other hand, if you feel that some of the shiny new features of DocFetcher Pro are worth paying for and/or you just want to make a donation, then by all means buy a copy of DocFetcher Pro once it comes out.

As to the specific new features of DocFetcher Pro, that's being worked on right now, so no further information on that can be provided at this time.

Release Schedule and Pricing

As mentioned above, DocFetcher Pro will be released in multiple steps. The current release schedule (subject to change) is as follows:

By the end of 2020 or in early 2021: DocFetcher Pro for Windows and Linux. The macOS version will follow with some delay due to technical difficulties. The software will be in beta for a while, meaning there may be a few bugs, and some minor functionality may be missing. Hence, the price during beta will be $35 rather than the full price of $40, and buyers of the beta will of course be able to upgrade to the full version at no additional cost. In addition, note that these versions of DocFetcher Pro do not support multiple concurrent users. The latter will be addressed by DocFetcher Pro Server later on (see below).
Early 2021: A long-overdue bugfix release for DocFetcher, which has stopped working due to some recent changes in the Java runtime. Until the bugfix release is available, please follow the instructions in the pinned notice on the DocFetcher bug tracker to get DocFetcher working again.
Later in 2021: DocFetcher Pro Server, a version of DocFetcher Pro featuring a search server and a web interface to properly support a multi-user scenario. “Properly” in this case means: not slow, unwieldy, buggy and crashy like the tacked-on multi-user support in the original DocFetcher. DocFetcher Pro Server is geared more towards business use, so the price will be higher than the non-server version. The price will probably also scale with the maximum number of clients that can simultaneously connect to the server, so that the software can (hopefully) remain affordable for small businesses and home use. The exact price curve for DocFetcher Pro Server is currently still up in the air.

More about the pricing: There will be no subscription model to continually steal money from your pocket. The prices stated above are for a perpetual license of the current major release, with bugfixes and support for 1+ year. Subsequent major releases with new features will require a separate purchase. The perpetual license is tied to a single user, so bundling and freely redistributing the software the way it can be done with the original DocFetcher is not permitted. (Every receiver would have to buy their own copy of DocFetcher Pro.)

Finally, please note that DocFetcher Pro will be English-only for the time being, as translations would significantly slow down development. Translations will be added later.

Notification

There's no release notification infrastructure for DocFetcher Pro, unfortunately, but you can subscribe to DocFetcher by going to this page and clicking on the “Get Updates” button.