A cross-platform desktop application built with Tauri and Rust for fast, private full-text PDF search.

$5 USD - One-time payment, lifetime license

• ✅ 14-day free trial with full features
• ✅ Works on unlimited devices
• ✅ All future updates included
• ✅ Completely offline after activation
• ✅ No subscription, no recurring fees

Buy PDF Finder Pro →

See License Activation Guide for details

🚀 Major performance and quality improvements have been implemented:

• 5-200x faster indexing through parallel processing and incremental updates
• Better search results with BM25 ranking and Porter stemming
• Enhanced reliability with comprehensive error handling
• Improved search quality with diacritics normalization

See specs/performance/2026-01-indexing-optimizations/ for complete technical details.

• 🔍 Full-Text Search: Fast text search across all indexed PDFs with BM25 ranking
• 🔐 Private & Offline: All indexing and searching happens locally on your machine
• 📁 Recursive Scanning: Automatically scans folders and subfolders for PDFs
• ⚡ Parallel Indexing: Utilizes all CPU cores for fast indexing
• 🔄 Incremental Updates: Only re-processes changed files
• 🎯 Advanced Filtering: Filter by file size, modification date, and more
• 🔤 Boolean Operators: Case-insensitive AND, OR, NOT operators for custom queries
• 📊 Metadata Extraction: Displays file size, modification date, and page count
• 🗄️ Local Indexing: Optimized SQLite FTS5 with WAL mode and Porter stemming
• 🖥️ Cross-Platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux

• Frontend: Vanilla JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3
• Backend: Rust with Tauri 2.0
• Indexing: SQLite with FTS5 (Full-Text Search), WAL mode, BM25 ranking
• PDF Processing: pdf-extract library with parallel processing (Rayon)
• Performance: Parallel PDF extraction, batch operations, incremental indexing

• Node.js (v18 or later)
• Rust (latest stable)
• npm or yarn

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/av/pdf-finder-pro.git
cd pdf-finder-pro

2. Install dependencies:

npm install

3. Run in development mode:

npm run dev

To run just the frontend (in a browser):

npm run frontend:dev

Build the application for your platform:

npm run build

To build just the frontend assets:

npm run frontend:build

The built application will be available in src-tauri/target/release.

1. Select Folder: Click "Select Folder to Index" and choose a directory containing PDFs
2. Index PDFs: Click "Index PDFs" to scan and index all PDF files recursively
3. Search: Enter search terms in the search box
   • Use boolean operators: rust AND programming
   • Combine terms: machine OR learning
   • Exclude terms: python NOT django
4. Filter Results: Use the filter options to narrow down results by size and date
5. Open PDF: Click on any result to open the PDF in your default viewer

All PDF text content is extracted and indexed using SQLite's FTS5 engine, enabling fast and efficient searches even with large document collections.

• AND: Find documents containing all terms
• OR: Find documents containing any of the terms
• NOT: Exclude documents containing specific terms

• Min/Max Size: Filter by file size in KB
• Date Range: Filter by modification date (from/to)

All data stays on your local machine. No data is sent to external servers.

Commercial Software - $5 one-time purchase required after 14-day trial.

For licensing details, see License Activation Guide.

Code is available for review but not for redistribution without a license.

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.