Supporting packages

Note

The Windows installation of Recoll is self-contained. Windows users can skip this section.

Recoll uses external applications to index some file types. You need to install them for the file types that you wish to have indexed (these are run-time optional dependencies. None is needed for building or running Recoll except for indexing their specific file type).

After an indexing pass, the commands that were found missing can be displayed from the recoll File menu. The list is stored in the missing text file inside the configuration directory.

The past has proven that I was unable to maintain an up to date application list in this manual. Please check https://www.recoll.org/pages/features.html for a complete list along with links to the home pages or best source/patches pages, and misc tips. What follows is only a very short extract of the stable essentials.

  • PDF files need pdftotext which is part of Poppler (usually comes with the poppler-utils package). Avoid the original one from Xpdf.

  • MS Word documents need antiword. It is also useful to have wvWare installed as it may be be used as a fallback for some files which antiword does not handle.

  • RTF files need unrtf, which, in its older versions, has much trouble with non-western character sets. Many Linux distributions carry outdated unrtf versions. Check https://www.recoll.org/pages/features.html for details.

  • Pictures: Recoll uses the Exiftool Perl package to extract tag information. Most image file formats are supported.

  • Up to Recoll 1.24, many XML-based formats need the xsltproc command, which usually comes with libxslt. These are: abiword, fb2 ebooks, kword, openoffice, opendocument svg. Recoll 1.25 and later process them internally (using libxslt).

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