I’m looking for a self hosted solution to this problem:
I want to create a full text search index from a collection of PDF manuals (text, not images, I don’t care about OCR here). There is a UI to search for text matches in documents, and clicking a search hit opens the PDF scrolled to where the search hit is (bonus points if the search hit is hilighted)
Not sure if paperless could fit your need https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx#features
Paperless is great. But it does not highlight the search text. The android app paperless mobile does. Another option could be zotero. It is meant for sientific papers but very powerful in handling large PDF collections. Hard to completly selfhost. But using WebDAV as storage is straightforward. Good look, let us know where you land.
I’m using it with ocr and it does highlight the search text and scrolls to it.
U r right, it does highlight in the pdf. It did not on mobile for me.
This sounds like it could be a job for Calibre-web.
Would paperless-ngx work?
That’s a very specific problem and I don’t know if there is an existing solution that does exactly what you want.
paperless-ngx does a lot of the things you ask for, it lets you upload pdfs, does OCR and gives you full text search via a web ui. It’s just not made specifically for manuals and it does not highlight the search hits or scrolls to them.
Elastic Search.
This sounds useful although I haven’t tried it myself: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40614824
