So you have a collection of thousands of PDF files.  You use Easy PDF Search to create a full text database that you use to search your PDF collection.  Now you want to allow other users to do the same.  What are your options?

Easy PDF Search Basic Edition allows up to 2 other users to search your PDF database, while the Standard Edition allows as many users as your machine can support.

Configuration

On the machine where the Easy PDF Search full text database database was created, in the Connect to Database window, select the Local database item and also the Database will be shared via hotspot item.

Starting the hotspot – Basic Edition

Click on the Start hotspot button on the toolbar.

Enter the hotspot settings you want to apply.

When you click the Start button, the hotspot will be active.  On the toolbar, there is now a Stop hotspot button.

Starting the hotspot – Standard Edition

Similar to the Basic Edition, click on the Start hotspot button on the toolbar to open the hotspot settings window.

You can learn more about the various hotspot settings for the Standard Edition here.

In short, you can support more users on the Standard Edition, and each user can be assigned roles that limit their access to your PDF libraries.

Connecting to a hotspot

In the Connect to Database window, select the Easy PDF Search Server item, and enter the IP address and port of the machine where the hotspot is active.

If you are connecting to a hotspot running the Basic Edition, leave the Login value empty.  If you are connecting to a Standard Edition server, you need to enter the Login value.

Click on the Connect button to connect to the hotspot-enabled database.  You can now search the PDF files in that database.

In Easy PDF Search 7.4, you can now filter the list of displayed libraries.  Say we have the following category and library structure:

To display only the PostgreSQL related libraries, we enter postgresql in the Filter libraries area.

Partial searches are also possible e.g.

To filter on multiple values, enter each word separated by a space e.g.

In the above example, Easy PDF Search will display all libraries containing the words postgresql or arduino.

If you need to filter phrases, enclose the phrase in double quotes e.g.

In this case, only libraries containing the word postgresql admin or arduino are displayed.

Download a 14-day trial of Easy PDF Search now and start searching your PDF files fast and work with the search results easily.

We added a ‘hotspot’ feature to Easy PDF Search to help you share your PDF index easily with other users.  We originally wanted to call it the ‘application server function’, but felt that ‘hotspot’ was a more user-friendly and recognisable name, and users would be familiar with the hotspot analogy on smartphones.

Setting up a hotspot

The hotspot function essentially shares your Easy PDF Search database with up to 2 other users.  When you set up a hotspot, you enter the port you want to open and the password.

Connecting to a hotspot

Once you have set up your hotspot, your users can connect to your hotspot using your computer name/IP address, port, and password.

Restrictions when searching a hotspot database

Your users can only search your existing index.  They will not be able to index any new files in your libraries.

This reduces the possibility of users indexing your PDF files unnecessarily.  For the user hosting the hotspot database, you can still index the new PDF files.

Let us know what you think of the hotspot feature, and any suggestions you may have.

The above feature area available in the Easy PDF Search Basic Edition.  For more advanced sharing options, you will require the Standard Edition.

You can download a 14-day trial of Easy PDF Search here, and experience for yourself how easy it is to search you PDF file collection, and share the index database with other users.

We had a user who contacted us recently with a navigation issue.  She had been using Easy PDF Search instead of Acrobat because Acrobat was too slow handling hundreds of pages.  However, because her PDF files are not in A4 format, it was cumbersome to scroll the pages using the scroll bars, to locate the search words.

We discovered that her PDF files were scans of historical publications, dating back to the mid-1850s, and were in the classic ‘broadsheet’ format.  This is a page at 50% magnification.

To read anything, you had to set the zoom to at least 200%.

To improve the usability for such files, we made the following changes in Easy PDF Search 7:

• mouse panning
  Pressing the CONTROL key, together with the left mouse button, and moving the mouse allows you to pan the page left/right and up/down.  This removes the need to use the scroll bars.
• scroll to next search word
  There is now a button you can click (or use the F3 key) to scroll the page to the next search word.

  
  You can limit the scope of this function by setting the 2 options to limit it to only the current word, and/or the current page.

  
  This removes the need to visually scan for the highlighted search words.

The user was amazed with these changes which helped her save even more time on a genealogical and historical research project.

You can download a 14-day trial of Easy PDF Search here, and experience for yourself how easy it is to search you PDF file collection.

in Easy PDF Search 6.5, we added the functionality  to export and import your category and library structure.  Some users wanted to share their library structures with other users, and there was no easy way to do that previously.

To export your library configuration settings, select the Export libraries configuration item from the Tools menu.

Then select a file to store the configuration in.  You can now share the file with another user.  To import the configuration, select the Import libraries configuration item from the Tools menu.

Then select the file you exported earlier.  Easy PDF Search will then import the category and library structure from the file.

Note that the existing library configuration will be replaced by this new configuration.

We recently had a user ask if it was possible to perform a search on the files returned by the search results in Easy PDF Search.  This isn’t possible for now.  There is however a workaround.

First, you need to copy the files returned by the initial search into another folder.  To do this, right click in the search results area to bring up the context menu, then select the Copy/move files to another folder… item.

In the subsequent window, enter the folder to copy the files to, then click on the Copy button.

Now we’ll need to create a library that references that folder.

Now all we need to do is select that library when we want to perform a search.