Translations:Kiwix 0.9 User Guide/6/en

• Full-text search engine and Indexing process

Using search engine Autocompletion feature. You can see the page titles stared with the word "Wikipedia", and then access to the desired page by clicking on the corresponding item of the list. You can also see the pages which includes the word "Wikipedia" by choosing the last item of the list (containing 'Wikipedia'...)

Kiwix includes a powerful search engine to help you easily access to the pages you are looking for and search a phrase through the content of the pages of a package. The full-text search engine is available only for the indexed ZIM files, it means if you have downloaded a Portable pre-indexed ZIM file, you will be able to use this ability. But for the Non-indexed ZIM files, you should index them first.

The search engine is located on the right side of the toolbar. If you can select the search box and type a word inside that, it means your search engine is ready to use. Otherwise, Kiwix will ask you if you want to index the ZIM file or not. You will need to confirm this process in order to use full-text search engine feature or cancel it and use the program without this feature. This step is very time-consuming process and depending on your ZIM file size and also the speed of your computer, might last several hours or even several days for big packages like English Wikipedia. Note that there is a 20 to 100 percents difference in size between the indexed and non-indexed ZIM files and if you want to index a ZIM file, your computer will have to create the index files which their size is equal to the same difference of the indexed and non-indexed ZIM files, so be careful to do this process without turning your system down or closing the application. You can also see how many percents of the indexing process has been proceeded or remained in the progressive green bar on the Status bar (like ), so your status bar should be active and do this appear that from Display menu if you can't see it now. Note that you won't need to do this long process if you download the Pre-Indexed ZIM file.

After being this process completed, the full-text search engine will be ready to use, you will just need to type a text into the search field and then press Enter on your keyboard. A page includes a list of matching results will appear and you can access the one you want to view.

If you don't want to use the full-text search ability, you can just type a word in the search box and see a list of the page titles stated with that word. The popup-list has the ability of Autocomplete and predicts the word being typed and suggests you the nearest page titles and you can choose the one you want subsequently.