[OS X TeX] status of Spotlight indexing of .tex files?

Jan Hegewald rurapente at gmx.de
Wed Dec 21 04:48:53 EST 2005


Hello,

Am 20.12.2005 um 20:29 schrieb Norm Gall:

>
> On 20-Dec-05, at 12:02 PM, Adam Maxwell wrote:
>
>>
>> On Tuesday, December 20, 2005, at 09:50AM, Jan Hegewald  
>> <rurapente at gmx.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> But currently Spotlight does not tell my which files and
>>> folders are not indexed. So I can not determine if important files
>>> are excluded.
>>
>> I think part of the anti-Spotlight sentiment around here is due to  
>> misunderstanding about what it's supposed to do (probably due in  
>> part to Apple's hype).  See <http://developer.apple.com/ 
>> documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/MetadataIntro/index.html>, which  
>> talks about "Metadata."  File content as raw text is recognized as  
>> a metadata tag, but it's mainly a catch-all when nothing else  
>> works (e.g. DVI files have no other metadata information available  
>> AFAIK, such as author, title, date).
>>
>> In reference to Herb's comment, it is good that not all text files  
>> are indexed the same; this allows BibTeX files to be imported  
>> differently than TeX documents, or html documents.  The implicit  
>> requirement is for application developers to ship an importer for  
>> the file types they support, though, or else Spotlight breaks down.
>
> There is also a certain lack of willingness to do a little research  
> to find things out.

No no, please don´t get me wrong. Maybe I was not so clear. With  
"Spotlight does not tell" I only wanted to say from a user point of  
view: If I type something in a search field and get the results, I  
would normally assume that this is all. But with Spotlight it´s is  
simply not the case because it skips some files and folders.
Of course one can try to work around with e.g. mdimport -f but for  
before one can do that, one have to know that the Spotlight search  
can be incomplete.

> http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301533 tells you  
> _exactly_ what folders are searched by Spotlight by default:

Yes, as soon as I noticed Spotlight search results are sometimes  
incomplete, I asked google and also found this URL.

Cheers,
--Jan--------------------------- Info --------------------------
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