We’ve just released an early version of Flax Filters, which allow basic conversion of various proprietary formats to plain text ready for indexing. Currently the filters support Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, the Open Office equivalent formats, Adobe PDF, plain text and HTML, but we’ll be adding more in the future (of course, we’d welcome contributions from third parties). We’re already using these filters in some customer installations.
We’ve also created a previewer, so users can see floating previews of the first page of a document in search results. We’ll be adding this feature to a future release of Flax Basic.
Feedback would of course be very welcome.