*.sxw to *.odt

RoyFocker · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 10:37 am Post subject: *.sxw to *.odt

I saw this afternoon that all files converted from *.sxw to *odt aren't indexed by my spotlight (I have the old files *sxw yet).
Any idea?

OPENSTEP · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 11:28 am Post subject:

Hmm...the importer should be indexing all of those files. Were the files re-saved? If so Spotlight should be indexing them.

ed

RoyFocker · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 12:09 pm Post subject:

Yes. I open the *.sxw and "save as" *.odt. Now looking for a text into the file (not the name of the file) found the *sxw but not the *.odt...
Crying or Very sad

OPENSTEP · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 9:42 pm Post subject:

Hmm...can you try doing the following:

Open a Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
Navigate to the directory containing your document. If it's in your documents folder, you do this by typing "cd Documents" (without the quotes)
Type "mdimport -d3 'Your document name.odt'" (the single quotes are required if you have spaces in the filename)

You should see a bunch of stuff printed out including the text of the document. If you don't see the text (the line starts with "kMDItemTextContent =") then there may be an importer problem. If you do see the text in the output, then the importer's providing the text to Spotlight just fine and, for some reason, there's a failure in Spotlight itself (which is beyond my control to fix...)

ed

OPENSTEP · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 9:45 pm Post subject:

Also, if you've ever run the old standalone installer you'll need to delete the old plugin. In that same terminal if you type:

"mdimport -L"

You'll get a list of the plugins that Spotlight is using. If you still have the old application installed on your hard drive or have used the standalone installer, you may need to physically remove that outdated importer to get the new one to be recognized. Spotlight becomes somewhat mystical if there are multiple copies of a thing or multiple things claiming they support certain formats...

ed

RoyFocker · Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2006 6:45 am Post subject:

I activated the renew of the spotlight index using "Onyx" and now all *.odt files that I created from *.sxw are indexed. Â¿?Â¿?Â¿?Â¿? Shocked

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sun Dec 17, 2006 12:35 am Post subject:

This may be a problem w.r.t. Onyx (not sure what that is)...

Spotlight importers are notoriously bad with sorting out which importer handles what files, especially multple versions of the importer or the file format (this really was not though out at all by the Spotlight engineers). The onyx reinstall may have done an "mdimport -r" which triggered a reindexing of files with certain extensions.

In theory our installer for Neo does this retrigger. Perhaps it missed it?

ed