text-seeker

Repository: github.com/LuisMRaimundo/Text-seeker

Multi-format boolean full-text search for local documents (PDF, DOCX, HTML, TXT, Markdown, Excel, CSV, images via OCR). Runs offline on your machine; indexes and caches live under your home directory.

Supported formats: TXT, PDF, DOCX, HTML, Markdown, Excel (.xlsx/.xls), CSV, common image formats (OCR).

Requirements

• Python 3.10+ with tkinter (the GUI) and pip.
• The Python packages in requirements.txt.
• Optional for OCR of scanned PDFs / images: Tesseract OCR and Poppler as system tools. See README_STARTING.md.

Install and run

pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py --gui

On Windows you can also double-click start_gui.bat once Python is installed and on PATH.

Windows users: there is no automatic installer — see INSTALL_WINDOWS.md for step-by-step manual setup of Python, Tesseract and Poppler, with verification and troubleshooting.

Tip: use a virtual environment if you prefer to keep dependencies isolated:

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate      # Windows  (or: source .venv/bin/activate)
pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py --gui

Tests

run_tests.bat

Or: python -m unittest discover -s tests -v

Continuous integration runs the same test suite on push (see .github/workflows/test.yml).

Repository layout

Path	Role
app.py, main.py	CLI orchestrator and Tkinter GUI
boolean_parser.py, nlp_utils.py	Query parsing, stemming, tokenization
indexing.py, text_extract.py	Inverted index and full-document extraction
search_*.py, html_search.py, text_search.py	Per-format search
tests/	Unit and integration tests

Documentation

File	Contents
INSTALL_WINDOWS.md	Manual Windows 10/11 setup (Python, Tesseract, Poppler)
README_STARTING.md	Install, launch, optional Tesseract & Poppler
QUICK_GUIDE.md	Boolean query syntax
TECHNICAL_MANUAL.md	Architecture

Data directories

Purpose	Path
Search index	~/.text-seeker_index/
PDF/OCR cache	~/.text-seeker_cache/

Copyright and use

Copyright © 2026 Luís Raimundo. All rights reserved.

This repository and its contents are proprietary research material. No open-source licence is granted. No permission to copy, redistribute, modify, publish, or derive works without prior written permission from the copyright holder.

Contact: lmr.2020@outlook.pt

Acknowledgements

This project was developed by Luís Raimundo with the support and funding of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) and Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

Funding DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/2020.08817.BD

The author also gratefully acknowledges Isabel Pires for her support throughout the development of this work.