How to index pdf, ppt, xl files in lucene (java based or python or php any of these is fine)?

Question

Also I want to know how to add meta data while indexing so that i can boost some parameters

Answer 1

You can use Apache Tika. Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries.

Supported Document Formats

• HyperText Markup Language
• XML and derived formats
• Microsoft Office document formats
• OpenDocument Format
• Portable Document Format
• Electronic Publication Format
• Rich Text Format
• Compression and packaging formats
• Text formats
• Audio formats
• Image formats
• Video formats
• Java class files and archives
• The mbox format

The code will look like this. Reader reader = new Tika().parse(stream);

Answer 2

Lucene indexes text not files - you'll need some other process for extracting the text out of the file and running Lucene over that.

Answer 3

There are several frameworks for extracting text suitable for Lucene indexing from rich text files (pdf, ppt etc.)

• One of them is Apache Tika, a sub-project of Lucene.
• Apache POI is a more general document handling project inside Apache.
• There are also some commercial alternatives.

Answer 4

see https://github.com/WolfgangFahl/pdfindexer for a java solution that uses PDFBox and Apache Lucene to split the PDF files page by page to text, index these text-pages and create a resulting html index file that links to the pages in the pdf sources by using a corresponding open parameter.