Release notes for Recoll 1.26.x

Caveats

Installing over an older version

1.26.6 update, loss of GUI preferences The preferences format change, which was supposedly intended for Windows, has unfortunately resulted in a change of name for the GUI preferences file under Linux. This was previously named ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf, and it is is now ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.ini. Changing back would risk causing even more trouble for the people who have began using the new file, and besides, the new name avoids confusion with the indexing configuration file ~/.recoll/recoll.conf, so we will keep it.
In order to recover your preferences under Linux, please exit recoll, then rename ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf to ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.ini.

1.20-26 indexes are fully backward compatible. Installing 1.26 over an 1.19 index is possible, but there have been small changes in the way compound words (e.g. email addresses) are indexed, so it will be best to reset the index. Still, in a pinch, 1.26 search can mostly use an 1.19 index.

New index format with Xapian 1.4: the default on-disk format of Xapian 1.4 (Glass) has changed to improve the performance of phrase searches. This had the infortunate consequence of rendering the Recoll snippets generation method excessively slow except for very small indexes. In consequence, new indexes created by Recoll 1.24/26 using Xapian 1.4 have a different format and store the document texts inside the index. No specific action is required from the user, except if you have and old index and want to use the new format (nicer snippets, faster phrase searches), in which case you should delete the old index (see next).

Always reset the index if you do not know by which version it was created (e.g.: you're not sure it's at least 1.18). The best method is to quit all Recoll programs and delete the index directory ( rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb), then start recoll or recollindex.
recollindex -z will do the same in most, but not all, cases. It's better to use the rm method, which will also ensure that no debris from older releases remain (e.g.: old stemming files which are not used any more).

On Windows, the index is located by default in C:/Users/[me]/AppData/Local/Recoll/xapiandb.

Case/diacritics sensitivity is off by default. It can be turned on only by editing recoll.conf ( see the manual). If you do so, you must then reset the index.

Changes in Recoll 1.26

• GUI: improved highlighting and snippets extraction, with proper processing of phrases. Allow displaying snippets for successive documents in the snippet window, link to result table hovering.
• Slightly improve processing of Hangul characters.
• GUI Index configuration: the skippedPaths editor now uses a file picker to create entries, and lets you edit them to possibly add wildcards.
• GUI: added option to suppress all beeps.
• GUI: snippets: add context menu to switch page/relevance sort.
• GUI: add Previous/Next buttons to the preview Window.
• GUI: improved search completer.
• GUI: add preference to turn off desktop notifications.
• Windows: aspell support.
• Windows: Outlook mail archive .pst file indexing.
• Windows: allow scheduling indexing operations by interfacing with the Windows task scheduler
• GUI: add preference to limit search history length or disable it.
• GUI: improved query language help tooltip.

Minor releases at a glance

• 1.26.7:
  • Fixes the 1.26.6 GUI preferences issue (only works for those who have not run 1.26.6).
• 1.26.6:

  1.26.6 update, loss of GUI preferences The preferences format change, which was supposedly intended for Windows, has unfortunately resulted in a change of name for the GUI preferences file under Linux. This was previously named ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf, and it is is now ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.ini. Changing back would risk causing even more trouble for the people who have began using the new file, and besides, the new name avoids confusion with the indexing configuration file ~/.recoll/recoll.conf, so we will keep it.
  In order to recover your preferences under Linux, please exit recoll, then rename ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf to ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.ini.

  • Add support for Hancom .hwp Hanword files.
  • GUI: Windows: convert GUI preferences storage from registry to .ini file. The conversion is automatic and will allow for easy backup and transfer of the preferences.
  • Add GUI preference to display the Snippets link even if the document has no pages. Allows displaying all the keyword hits, in a form more compact than the preview.
  • GUI: Adjust the result table font size to match the result list one.
• 1.26.5:
  • New OCR function with support for caching and pluggable engines (currently supporting tesseract and ABBYY FineReader. Also works on Windows. This should now be really usable, in contrast to the previous version which was little more than a gadget. See the manual for details.
  • GUI: do a better job of restoring the geometry on startup, esp. use the right monitor (only tried on Windows).
  • Windows GUI: adjust the result table font size with the reslist one.
  • Index more metadata for openxml files (docx etc.).
  • Fix possible infinite loop in zip internal decoder.
• 1.26.4:
  • Fix infinite loop with some corrupted compressed files.
  • Windows: fixe issues with non-ascii directory names in topdirs.
  • Improve memory use behaviour with some very big XML-based (e.g. libreoffice or .docx) documents.
• 1.26.3:
  • Fix some search entry completer crashes.
  • Add a recollq option to get an exact count of results (using it can slow down the search and make it longer to get the top few results).
  • Port Firefox plugin support to Windows and Mac.
  • Add shortcut to open the snippets window for a results table entry. (Ctrl+e).
  • Extend PDF XMP custom processing interface with possibility to process the XML elements instead of their text content.
  • Add options for collapsing duplicate results to the Python API and the recollq command line.
  • Default to single-thread indexing operation on the Mac. Multithread has locking issues, and does not seem to improve performance anyway (at least in the VirtualBox VM).
  • Fix crash on Mac OS X which was probably also a bug on other platforms: avoid explicit deletion of preview widget.
• 1.26.1:
  • GUI: fix wrong default for the search history size preference. The default of 0 disabled the search history.
  • GUI: actually remember when disabling the temp file warning from the dialog.