[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 48672] New: LibreOffice (and OpneOffice) does not provide a search by content

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48672

             Bug #: 48672
           Summary: LibreOffice (and OpneOffice) does not provide a search
                    by content
    Classification: Unclassified
           Product: LibreOffice
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: Linux (All)
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: Libreoffice
        AssignedTo: libreoffice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
        ReportedBy: jtaller2006 at yahoo.com


Created attachment 59942
  --> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=59942
This document contains text "abc". It can't be found by search engine by
content.

2012/04/13

This query:
why libreoffice does not search by content
Produces 235,000 hits.

For reference pls see:
http://en.libreofficeforum.org/node/1141
http://ask.libreoffice.org/question/1814/why-libre-does-not-provide-a-search-by-content

This is a problem of coordination between Linux and Open/LibreOffice.
I would like to propose to Linux that any new document formats generated by
OpenOffice, LibreOffice, WhateverFutureOffice will come with a plugin that gets
called by Linux search program. For example Ubuntu has a program called "search
for files". The program will not find by content documents like .odt .ott
.docx. That is because these documents use nested files format. It should be
required for any new word processor with new data format to provide a plugin
which would be hookable (I don't mean se-x) into the search engine. Yes, I did
find some scripts that can look inside the .odt but those scripts are unusable
when you have 100,000 documents. (I do have that many.) 
Suggestions:
While this could be very complex problem if you want to search XML files by
tags, I am advocating simple solution that will satisfy most users. The .odt
and .docx and others contain a collection of zipped files one of them contains
the data called content.xml. I would like you to unzip the .odt/.ott/.docx
(etc) into temp dir, then search content.xml and report that f1.odt if f1.odt
contains the content we are looking for. This should be integrated with Linux
search GUI so that I can click on the link to the file. If you can isolate in
content.xml the section that contains the user data, that would be great.
Alternately, If you treat the whole content.xml as the user data, you will get
some false hits but I am willing to live with that until you write something
that looks only at the user's data inside content.xml. But the current
situation is so unacceptable that in the last year I started to use .doc format
on my Ubuntu because I can then find my files. -- sad story. Thank you for
listening.

Attachment:
This document contains text "abc". It will not be found by search engine by
content on Ubuntu/Gnome using Ubuntu search engine.

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