Question

Hi,

I'm currently looking for a wiki-based solution that would allow my company to create and administrate a knowledge base for it's engineers. One of the main criterias is that this solution has to permit search into Mathcad sheets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad), which are used to compute scientific calculations.

I understand that TWiki can certainly not read those files, but is it possible that its search engine could find key words into these sheets if they were present, melted with code ?

I can provide a Mathcad sheet if anyone thinks it needs testing.

Regards, Christophe Sutter

Environment

-- ChristopheSutter - 12 Jun 2008

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

Look into the existing Extensions:search index solutions. They have helper applications to convert a proprietary format to a plain text format that the indexer can process. It is possible to create new helper apps.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Jun 2008

I wrote a Java program to import Mathcad sheets some years ago. However IIRC it only worked with Mathcad 6 and earlier, because Mathcad moved to a binary database format after that. It may still be possible to scrape ascii strings of course, but I suspect you just have to tell the search tool to treat the files as "unknown binary".

-- CrawfordCurrie - 13 Jun 2008

May be one of the Google:Mathcad+file+converter can help.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Jun 2008

Converting files would be very too heavy to do, if we had to do it each time, but I took a look at the extensions page and found two of them that allow to specify the file-extensions the search engine has to verify.

Thank you for your help, I keep you posted and I will mark this question answered if I succeed.

-- ChristopheSutter - 13 Jun 2008

I succeeded in installing TWiki on my machine by using the WMware version, and it works perfectly well. I also have identified the extension I would need (Plucene) to do what I want, but I have a little problem : I don't know how to transfer files from my Windows XP physical hdd to my virtual debian hdd...

Is my physical hdd visible from the virtual machine ? If so, how an I know which one it is ?

Thank you !

-- ChristopheSutter - 19 Jun 2008

You should also have a look at SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn (KinoSearch is much faster than Plucene). There is a chapter in the doc how to implement searches on further document types (see http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn#Indexing_further_document_types)

-- MarkusHesse - 21 Jun 2008

Closing this after more than 30 days of inactivity. Please feel free to re-open if needed.

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Aug 2008