[AlphaGeekZulu]

Yep! In the search field above the library window, press the "FT" button on the very left. You have to create the index the first time you use the feature. It takes a while and from there on new books are indexed automatically.

FT search has word and phrase search, boolean operators and NEAR search abilities. And there is a really cool match list, giving some context of the match before you actually go to it in the PDF file.

You cannot search across libraries, though.

[AlphaGeekZulu]

Note: AS far as I know, Calibre does not do OCR, so a PDF with only scanned content will not work.

[ggpsv]

I've had good luck using Tesseract [0] for scanned PDFs. If you're not CLI-inclined, there are several GUIs for it available [1]. I have had good luck downloading scanned PDFs from archive.org and running them through Tesseract.

Did not know about Calibre for this - I was relying on opening each search and searching it individually.

[0]: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract [1]: https://www.opait.com/tessstudio/

[kristofferR]

OCRmyPDF is a tool using Tesseract, specifically designed for PDFs. I would recommend that over pure Tesseract.

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

[kristofferR]

I recommend running any such PDFs through OCRmyPDF.

https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

[Fluorescence]

Oh, lol, I never knew that.

I created a script that dumped my library of 1000s of books to .txt and then grepped them.