I am an electronics engineer and I regularly view PDF schematics. Often I encounter the scenario where I would like to search the schematic for a component, e.g. "R1"
The problem is that searching for "R1" matches all the R[tens] and R[hundreds] on the schematic as well. So I would like to be able to use a regex in my search, or at least have tighter control of the search (e.g. search whole word only).
Has anyone here found a good PDF tool on Ubuntu which supports these features?
Install pdfgrep :
sudo apt-get install pdfgrep
And then use -C option and word boundaries match:
pdfgrep -C 0 '\<WORD\>' file.pdf
or use \b...\b instead of \<...\>.
See its man pdfgrep
-C, --context NUM
Print at most NUM characters of context around each match.
I have googled and found JPedal(30-days trial). Download and open it via command-line by the following command:
java -jar jpedal-trial.jar
Now press Ctrl+F, type the word that you want to search and check the "Find Whole Words Only" from Down-arrow icon (
) to search for whole word.
If you are fine with creating an index of your documents you could use Recoll which is a full-on desktop search engine. For screenshots and installation instructions please take a look at this answer.
Recoll searches are constructed using a poweful query language that supports wildcards and modifiers (e.g. proximity and slack).
For instance, the query "R1"l would only yield whole-word results. This is because the l modifier turns off stemming. (In this specific example you wouldn't even need the modifier because Recoll doesn't expand sequences of numbers by default).
If the problem is just to limit the search to whole words, that is easy enough. Just add spaces before and after your search string, like so: " R1 ". I use this trick in Evince all the time.
