Spotlight Searches and Mellel 2.1

[alexwein]

I downloaded the plug-in off the downloads page, removed the old plug-in, then installed the new plug-in and it works fine with new and old Mellel files. I did not have to re-save anything.

Alexandria

[joewiz]

It should work if you do as I did. Delete the old plugin, install the new one and then open each of your old files and just save each in turn. You should have spotlight doing full content searching then.

If you've already gone through the steps of deleting the old plugin and installing the new one, and you've confirmed that the new plugin is correctly scanning new and re-opened/re-saved documents, then let me suggest a much less manually intensive way of getting spotlight to scan all of your files:

Flush the contents of your spotlight cache. Do this by opening System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, and adding your hard drive to the list of directories that spotlight should *not* scan. Now remove your hard drive from that list. In effect, these two steps delete the old cache and begin the scanning process anew. You may need to go through one more step to get the scanning process going: starting a spotlight search. Then the scanning will start and take a few hours, most likely.

[SteveH]

Flush the contents of your spotlight cache. Do this by opening System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, and adding your hard drive to the list of directories that spotlight should *not* scan. Now remove your hard drive from that list.

Presumably you could just add your Home folder to ease the burden of rescanning?

[joewiz]

Flush the contents of your spotlight cache. Do this by opening System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, and adding your hard drive to the list of directories that spotlight should *not* scan. Now remove your hard drive from that list.

Presumably you could just add your Home folder to ease the burden of rescanning?

Sure - you could just add your Documents folder too, if that's the only place you save your Mellel documents.

[laup]

It should work if you do as I did. Delete the old plugin, install the new one and then open each of your old files and just save each in turn. You should have spotlight doing full content searching then.

Good luck.

Spotlight appears to be partially working after I deleted the old plugin and reinstalled the new Spotlight plugin (freshly downloaded). If I use a word in the interior of a newly created file, Spotlight finds the rtf and pdf files that I created by exporting the Mellel document, but it still does not find the original Mellel file. In contrast, it does find the Mellel file of the draft manuscript from about a week ago.

I don't know Spotlight's process, so I suppose that it is possible that Spotlight has not yet searched the interior of the mellel document, but will do so later. It has been perhaps ten minutes or so, not hours. Still, it found the pdf and rtf versions right away.

I also ran MORU, pointing at the right folder and it did find the file.

Recall that Spotlight did not find a test Mellel file for at least a period of tens of minutes, although I could find the file with MoRU by directing MoRU to the relevant directory. Checking back on this issue a few days later, I see that Spotlight now finds the test file by itself. Thus, the problem may simply have been that for whatever reason Spotlight's updating of indexing was slow. In any case, I did not have to do the reflushing and restrimulating explained in another posting in the forum, but it's nice to know how to do that. THanks.

[inigo]

hello!
I'm using Mellel 2.11 but despite all your tips (removing old plugin, rescanning, etc.), Spotlight has still problems with files made by the version of Mellel.
The spotlight plugin is still in beta version?
What should I do?

[nigel]

Plugin does not work on my intel iMac nor on my intel MacBook.

Hope that it gets fixed soon.

Thanks,
Nigel

[nigel]

It should work if you do as I did. Delete the old plugin, install the new one and then open each of your old files and just save each in turn. You should have spotlight doing full content searching then.

Nope, this doesn't work for me either.

Nigel

[ddauerbach]

I'm not sure why it works for some and not others. But here's the telltale symptom:

ddapbook:~ david$ mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/mellel.mdimporter
2006-09-21 12:55:12.986 mdimport[1994] Asking server to reimport files with UTIs: ()

Note the empty parentheses. I'm pretty sure they should contain a list of relevant file types.
Compare with:
mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter
2006-09-21 12:54:49.497 mdimport[1992] Asking server to reimport files with UTIs: (
"dyn.ah62d4rv4ge80n5pqtb2gc6xy",
"dyn.ah62d4rv4ge80n5pqta",
"dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8ynxnqpa",
"com.apple.mail.emlx.part",
"com.apple.mail.emlx"
)

I wrote to redlers about this but no reply.

[verma]

what system are you running? 10.4.7?

Does your Word-import work fine? Does your NeoOffice import work fine?

The latest OSX (10.4.7) update contained enhancemetns for Spotlight - I'd like to know if someone is running 10.4.6 and has Spotlight problems.

My Spotlight problems are not limited to Mellel.

I believe everyone involved is still actively looking for a solution.

[nigel]

what system are you running? 10.4.7?

Does your Word-import work fine? Does your NeoOffice import work fine?

The latest OSX (10.4.7) update contained enhancemetns for Spotlight - I'd like to know if someone is running 10.4.6 and has Spotlight problems.

My Spotlight problems are not limited to Mellel.

I believe everyone involved is still actively looking for a solution.

I am running OSX 10.4.7
I have this symptom as well:
Metropolis:~ nigel$ mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/mellel.mdimporter
2006-09-21 17:38:10.294 mdimport[3576] Asking server to reimport files with UTIs: ()

All other spotlight searches seem to work fine.

Thanks,
Nigel

[aechallu]

My previous installation did nothing. After reading this thread I deleted the old plugin from the /Library/Spotlight directory, tried to install the new plugin but it says "There's nothing to install"...

Any help?

[ddauerbach]

10.4.7

Yep, no joy with .doc and .xls either.

I did reindex my Documents folder.
So I am beginning to think that this is apple's problem.

[jzents]

10.4.7

Yep, no joy with .doc and .xls either.

I did reindex my Documents folder.
So I am beginning to think that this is apple's problem.

I am running 10.4.7 and I have no trouble with .doc .xls or .Mellel. I did once and I found a extraneous folder inside the Spotlight folder. I deleted it and everything now works fine with the Mellel importer 1.6.5. Cheers!

[verma]

I am running 10.4.7 and I have no trouble with .doc .xls or .Mellel. I did once and I found a extraneous folder inside the Spotlight folder. I deleted it and everything now works fine with the Mellel importer 1.6.5. Cheers!

Do you happen to remember which folder it was?

I have:

mellel.mdimporter
SourceCode.mdimporter
a folder called "Contents" - inside there's something about MailTags
MicrosoftOffice.mdimporter
Keynote.mdimporter
AppleWorks.mdimporter
Pages.mdimporter

all are located in /Library/Spotlight.

Thanks.



UPDATE POSSIBLE SOLUTION FOR SPOTLIGHT PROBLEMS?

I've thrown out the "Contents" folder related to MailTags (a mail plugin) that was sitting in my root /Library/Spotlight folder; and I've chucked out the mailtag.mdimporter in the Users/me/Library/Spotlight folder as well.

I can proudly say: the Mellel Spotlight mdimporter works again (so far I've checked only with one folder).

Word's Spotlight indexing is also restored and functions normally.

For all users with problems: could you see if there's a CONTENTS folder inside the root /Library/Spotlight folder - remove it (or drag it to your desktop) and for a test: create a new document and then try to spotlight-find content.

Thanks for the original suggestion! It helped loads.