Featuring: New text-recognition in PDF Files and improved volume indexing for more reliable search accuracy.

UltraFinder makes its way into the 2024 updates. This release features an indispensable upgrade to UF’s searching capabilities for PDF files: support for image-only searching. Also in this release is an update to volume indexing for faster and more reliable search indexes.

Download and update to the latest release now.

Enhanced PDF search:

Support for image only PDFs

This upgrade allows users to search through a wider variety of PDF files. This includes PDFs that have images of text, images and text, and as usual, text-only files.  

UltraFinder’s new OCR-enabled search allows users to search through image-based or image-only PDFs for text data.

This new feature utilizes Optical character recognition (OCR) technology to convert images into text, and then feeds that into UltraFinder’s searching functionalities. If you give it a legible enough file, this technology will work for scanned documents, icons, logos with texts, and even your own personalized and handwritten notes.

Here’s a couple of things you can do with this new feature:

• Digitizing scanned documents
  Quickly convert scanned paper documents such as contracts and academic papers into searchable digital files.
• Simplify data entry
  Extract data from PDFs of forms, invoices, databases, etc.
• Make your documents searchable
  Index your PDF files so you can have your own digital library or knowledge base.

Faster PDF searches: Indexing and caching

To augment the previous update, we’ve also added a function to index the extracted text to make PDF searching significantly faster. Furthermore, we’ve added a simple cache with a certain threshold of files to minimize the indexing times.

This essentially tags your converted images inside your PDFs into text making it easier to store and retrieve once you decide to look for it again.

Volume indexing update:

Performance and reliability

Multiple updates have been undertaken with UltraFinder’s indexing algorithm to enable faster and more reliable file searches.

First off, volumes or drives indexing have been updated to speed up file searches. This means snappier and more responsive file queries even with just portions of the file or the file name. 

Furthermore, apart from making it faster, this update will make rebuilding indexes more consistent and reliable. Indexes are constantly rebuilt when files are added, removed, or modified. This update ensures that the database remains up-to-date so you can quickly locate files accurately.

It also comes with the benefits of making indexing consistent across any type of file organization, particularly those with unique file system structures or access restrictions.

Enhanced troubleshooting

Additional logging is now enabled to help support and engineering address user reports. This helps diagnose current and future issues for a better overall customer experience.

What’s Next for UltraFinder?

As you may know, UltraFinder exists in the UltraEdit ecosystem of tools and these tools share certain functionalities and qualities with each other (e.g. cloud storage integration in UE, UC, & UF). In a similar way, the team is considering adding the PDF OCR technology into UltraCompare so you can make compares of two image-only PDFs. 

If this interests you or you have other suggestions, send us your ideas on what you want to see in UltraFinder (or on any of UltraEdit’s tools) in the future. Have specific questions? Let us know what tutorials, blog posts, or even webinars you want as well.