GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 734884
Please add regular expression search
Last modified: 2018-05-22 15:48:02 UTC
Please extend the search function to allow searching for a regular expression in a pdf that is being viewed.
Please provide a use case that's not a corner case.
You requested a use case. This "bug" is a request for enhancement, so there is no error case to report. What I am asking for, basically, is this: View a pdf. Click Ctrl-F, which brings up a Find menu. Works if I type in a text string. But I want to search for either of two words. Regular expression would be, for example, something like "This|That" or "This\|That" but this does not work. I read the documentation. No mention of regular expression search being a feature of this program. So I issued a request for enhancement. Presumably one would call this up by typing something like ctrl-alt-F instead of just ctrl-f to get the enhanced search box. I further assume there are packages publickly available that would provide functionality similar or identical to 'grep' that could be called from evince to provide this function. Further note: I am at version 2.28.2 because this is the version supplied with latest RedHat Linux. If regex is already available in a later version of evince, that's great, please let me know and I will see if I can get the source code and make it work here. Thanks, George Reeke
(In reply to comment #2) > You requested a use case. This "bug" is a request for enhancement, so there is > no error case to report. Correct. However the question is how often this is actually needed, and how many users would understand and use it. As this is the first time I come across a request to support regex search in Evince, it might be very low priority.
Andre--Oh, I didn't understand what you meant by the term "use case". My actual usage is this: I am a scientist. I often find citations of literature that appears interesting given its title. I download the pdf. Now I would like to find the part of the paper that might be of immediate interest, so I would like to search for two or three keywords, plus maybe the authors of a paper that this paper cited to see the context of the citation. As it is, I have to do separate searches for every term that comes to mind. Often I would like to do the same search for multiple terms across multiple pdfs, so it would be useful upon opening a new pdf file to be able to just click on the same single multiterm search. Another case (unusual in English, more frequent working in German) is the word that has different grammatical forms, e.g. search for "mouse" and need to do a separate search for "mice". An actual recent example: I was interested in the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic, so I did some searches just for "Kolmogorov" and then learned that some authors shorten this to "KS test" so then I started searching twice to check both forms. A single regex search could easily handle this one. I consider that this capability would be of use to anybody who reads a lot of online pdf literature, and that even people unfamiliar with regex would quickly learn how to search for "This|That". Given that most of these examples involve just "OR" searches and not all the flexibility of regex, an "OR" search would be almost as useful and worth having if a lot easier to implement than regex. Maybe people are used to this from google. George Reeke
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/issues/498.