Indexing Word Documents and PDFs with Sphinx

Question

I have a website where users upload documents in .doc and .pdf format. I am using Sphinx to conduct full text searches on my SQL database (MySQL). What is the best way to

Answer 1

The method I use for this is pdf2text and antiword. I use both of these to dump the contents of the pdfs and word documents into the database. From there it's easy to crawl with Sphinx.

Answer 2

Has anyone used Tika to index other types of documents, much like the SOLR plugin? Apache Tika

Some links:

1. PDF2TEXT is in poppler or poppler-utils on Linux
2. ANTIWORD -- seems to be for old .doc, not newer .docx

Answer 3

Unfortunately, Sphinx can't index those file types directly. You'll need to either import the textual contents into a database, or into an XML format that Sphinx can understand.