Advanced searching in Tracker Search Tool? Filter by folders?

I have checked several "Tracker Search Tool" questions, but they all stop at very superficial usage. Google, at least for me, didn't turn out anything either. I am using Maverick, 10.10.

Here is my situation and workflow: I am studying for a Masters, and writing academic essays. Through my university, I have access to multiple academic journals, and their articles are in PDF. So when I'm writing one of my essays, this is what I do:

• I have all the PDF files that I found online, in a folder, organized in subfolders. I also have a few ebooks, in PDF format. And some articles in HTML and Office .doc formats (that I usually convert to .odt).

• As I write, I use Tracker Search Tool to find and add references from within my downloaded articles and ebooks. It's like having a mini-Google within materials that I know I have, and that I know it's academically appropriate.

• However, I work on several subjects, and right now, to use Tracker Search Tool but limit the results to one of the subjects (all the materials for that subject are in a specific folder), I need to stop tracker, delete the databases, change the indexed locations to the one specific to the current subject, and re-index everything.

Does the Tracker Search Tool have any special syntax that I can use to limit results to a specific folder/subfolder within the indexed locations? Does anyone have a link to help on this specific tool? The GNOME page for the Tracker project doesn't have anything.

Solution 1:

The best app I found for doing advanced full text searches is regexxer it was a god send for editing website files. Regexxer is available in the Software center.

Hope this helps.

Solution 2:

I know this is not really about tracker, but looking at your workflow (and thus answering an underlying question), I would definitely recommend taking a look at Mendeley. It's a scientific reference and literature database software, advanced search, full text search, tagging, annotating pdf's, automatic .bib files etc. It's what I use for managing my thesis' literature, and I love it.

Edit: Since this post was written, Mendeley sold (out) to Elsevier. An open-source alternative is Zotero.