Software for indexing digital books and documents and make their texts searchable

I'm looking for preferably free software that will allow one to search a private collection of PDF's and other document and e-book formats for words or sentences in the book.

My purpose is to quickly find citations and relative passages based on search queries. I would like the query to present the file that contains the match, the page number, a sample of the passage, and option to open it up to read it in the passage's entirety. I don't need all these feature but does something like this exist?

I run Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, and Windows, so software for any of these operating systems will do.

jonschipp

• digital-collections
• software
• ebooks
• indexing
• pdf

Comments

• jonsca: Hi jonschipp, we generally try to discourage shopping recommendation questions (see http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/ for more details), as they tend to be localized to one particular situation and the answers can become obsolete over time.
• Mary Jo Finch: While the information this question generates may date over time, it seems like it could be immensely valuable for a lot of folks now. Perhaps it could be reworded to ask if anyone has found a successful way to search the text of a collection of pdfs, etc. This may yield a software solution or some other technical workaround.