Searching through a bulk of pdf files (lemmy.ca)

submitted 5 days ago by Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I have a pile of part lists for tools I'm maintaining, in pdf format; and I'm looking for a good way to take a part number, search through the collection of pdfs, and output which files contain that number. Essentially letting me match random unknown part numbers to a tool in our fleet.

I'm pretty sure the majority of them are actual text you can select and copy+paste, so searching those shouldn't be too difficult; but I do know there's at least a couple in there that are just a string of jpgs packed in a pdf file. They will probably need OCR, but tbh I can probably live with skipping over those altogether.

I've been thinking of spinning up an instance of paperless-ngx and stuffing them all in there so I can let it index the contents including using OCR, then use it's search feature; but that also seems a tad overkill.

I'm wondering if you fine folks have any better ideas. What do you think?

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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025

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