Interesting thread here (more than 4 pages I'm afraid):

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/i-need-to-index-pdf-files-in-my-laptop-running/ef5fa7c3-bb64-4f3e-9607-3e01349dccca?page=5

Even Adobe products can search several pdf's in a row, but it doesn't seem to be fast.

Have a look here:

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/ifilter/performance.php

Foxit pdf iFilter is 20 bucks per seat; if it works, that should be very reasonable.

When having crawled many more "search pdf index" sites, I'll do perhaps some testing, just indexing my current pdf's of all sorts with multiple progs and compare the results (and no, there does NOT seem to be any such prog that will tell you it can't properly index a pdf...). Prob here, in order to not affect the indexing with one prog by the previous installation of a competing prog, I'd have to to reset my comp to a previous state between every trialling (takes my 30 minutes each time). But from the above thread you'll have understood that the pdf format is the worst file format you can get. All the more so it'd be helpful to know which indexing search tools (and in which global circumstances of your system) will deliver reliable results. I would have expected many more insights into this format from the "academic sw" side (where reliability of pdf searches would be crucial), but no...

I

tomos, I'm sorry there's been a misunderstanding.

You do the best you can, with underwhelming sw; I have used window managers in order to glue frames together, and I finished by having set up a two screen combination (cf. my description of it here: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=32735.0 ), and I would like to add here, re this setting, that a relevant part of my system is wndhop.exe, a small, free utility that by pressing Win+Enter will shift your current window into the other screen.

What I meant was, it's totally unprofessional, on the part of developers (!), to force your users to employ such mean means: Instead of providing 3 or 4 "listers" for those who would like to use them, you "offer" several "windows" that then will not even automatically glue together but will "flow" on your screen and cause endless trouble there: This is all ridiculous and inacceptable - and the fact that you can maximize both windows to two different screens, isn't any good since your file commander is a TOOL, and should be considered secondary to your main applications. So there is no real excuse for this, and the price of this thing only adds to this total unprofessionalism. (see below)

I hadn't been aware you could take my criticism that was entirely directed to gpsoft's product, personally; if I had foreseen this possibility, I would have worded otherwise. Sorry again, has never been even my intention to insinuate something like this.

II

As for the ostensible irrelevance of my wanting 3 or 4 panes, I'll try again.

Very often, I rearrange not just some files, but rather big groups of files that are categorized into some 2 or 3 sub-folders, and I re-arrange them into different groupings.

Then, this re-arrangement, most of time, isn't into brand-new sub-folders, but partly into existing ones, i.e. some that have some content yet. And here, I then see files that, with the new content from those other sub-folders, would not be at their right place here in the future, so my re-arrangements are not really from one source folder into more than one target folders, but rather crosswise, from folder a into b, from a into c, from c into d, from c into b, from b into d.

Now, with the usual arrangement of just two panes, you'll DEFER all these moves that ain't readily available, and you try to GROUP them, i.e. you do what you easily CAN do, and then you open another sub-folder within the second pane, and you try to do a max here, shifting around, between these two specific folders, as many files as you can get for this task. Then again, another "combi" of just two panes, and so on and on and on.

Now, with four such panes visible at the same time, it's much more easy to shuffle all these files around, one by one, without having to "form groups for further processing", etc., you just work "naturally": this file doesn't belong in pane 2, so you press the key that will move it to pane 4, etc., with any such file, as long as it doesn't belong into a fifth or sixth pane: In my scenario, it's only for these files that you'll need "further processing".

It's clear as day that for re-arranging files within a group of similar sub-folders, such a more-than-just-2-panes setting comes extremely handy, and in practice, most of the time, it's just the THIRD pane that I'm missing: it's rare that I'd need a fourth, let alone a fifth or sixth pane.

And this means, this Norton Commander DOS style, 20 years after DOS, is RIDICULOUS and UNPROFESSIONAL, all the more so for 100-bucks sw, since much better solutions would come extremely handy for everyone, and would not be difficult to implement.

And now, with the mouse, with drag-n-drop, and with several windows (or even just run two competing file commanders concurrently and do the drag and drop between them), this is technically possible, but it's unprofessional, and it's a big pain in my arm...

and younger people here that don't have such medical probs should be warned: Today's web pages force you to do a tremendous amount of mouse shifting (and clicking, theoretically, so I bought (the overpriced) "Nib" sw years ago, and without it, I would probably not be able to even type anymore) -

so, you do your lot of mouse shifting (and clicking) on web pages alone: No need whatsoever to do heavy drag n drop in any other prog since here, those developers could perfectly do otherwise than forcing you to endless mouse abuse.

Mice are harmful to your health, that's a proven fact. Are you sure you won't get probs, next year or in ten years? Ok, a truck could roll over you in the meantime, but that'd be fate. Problems in your right arm would be pure silliness (of yours, and the developers laugh all their way to the bank (since your "mouse preference" gives them the opportunity to go swim, instead of implementing some keyboard shortcuts, at their office, when outside the sun's shining).

Think again about mouse use whenever you could avoid it.

Have a look into the web: There are special keyboards used in news agencies like Reuters and such, with many additional keys: They are professionals: They know what they do.

And no, it's NOT because their offices ain't big enough, and there'd be no space for a mouse pad ;-)

I'd like to add some details:

Agent Ransack / File Locator Light takes, on my system, about 2 minutes for finding things in a folder with several hundred files with more than 1 GB altogether. This is a very long time, from a subjective pov.

But then, I've got hundreds of outliner files that can NOT be searched by the major search tools, and even for Ultra Recall users, AR/FLL/FLPro (which for 39 bucks adds some more Boolean functionality, etc.) is of high interest since UR doesn't have multi-file search (because their philosophy is, "have it all in one big file", and there, search is top-notch).

It even searches for accented characters that are encoded in the form \'ep or \'aj, i.e. if I need to find files with such characters, I enter the term hélène in this form h\'efl\'edne (just an example) in File Locator (you could do this by macro automatically replacing special chars in your search terms), and it will not only really find these files (no wrong "hits", no overlooked occurences, as far as I can tell after some years of use)

but it will also give you the respective contexts of the terms found (multiple for a file if there are multiple hits).

Thus: For normal usage, a "real", indexing, search tool, like X1, is certainly best. But have a look at File Locator whenever you have special needs, it could save your day.

In general, if you have special files to search, don't read the "covered file formats" lists of the different progs, but download all of the available tools and trial them one by one, for / with your special files: Often, the developers themselves do not know what file formats their tools do recognize by accident.