To search contents of books in Calibre

Question

The manual says that you can search a book, here. However, I am not sure if this is about its content. I have not managed to find a way to search the content in OSX's Calibre in Yosemite 10.10.3.

GUI in Advanced Search:

where I get no matches although I should get . Books are PDF, CHM and ebook formats.

How can you search contents of book in Calibre?

Solution 1

From the page you linked:

The Search Interface

You can search all the metadata by entering search terms in the search bar. Searches are case insensitive.

The screenshot you posted also clearly shows that the word or phrase you're searching for will be matched only in metadata fields (i.e. tags).

From what I could find Calibre doesn't have in-built full-text search. It was listed as being on the developer's TODO list in 2010, but in 2011 (i.e. 4 years ago) he marked the issue as Won't Fix.

This plugin might help you though.

If you open an individual book with Calibre E-Book viewer it has a function to search text within a book.

Solution 2

The way I do it is with Devonthink Pro Office (which I'll refer to as DT). I use DT to create a searchable index at the base of the library rather than copy books into DT. DT has a very flexible/powerful search vocabulary. This works exceptionally well. After adding new books, I tell DT to update its index via File > Update index.... Additionally, DT ships with Abby Fine Reader integrated, so I use that to convert any PDFs into a searchable format if they are not currently. This also works exceptionally well.

Comments

[Matias]

Personally, I couldn't get the plugin to install, because it seems to be only meant to run on Linux (screenshot of error), but YMMV. However, as this answer mentioned in the last paragraph, opening the individual book, right-clicking the top half and selecting "Search" worked wonders (Screenshot). :)

[Toto]

How is this better than accepted answer? The question is about calibre.