What do make a word cloud out of a whole bunch of documents or do some simple statistics? Lucene is great for indexing documents, but I wanted something quick and dirty I could mess around with.

For example, here is a cloud tag from my research papers:

Some quick code I cooked up to extract text from a collection of word/pdf:

You’ll need to include these references:

using Word=Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using org.pdfbox.pdmodel;
using org.pdfbox.util;
using System.IO;

Read up the pdf project parser here. This will get the raw text from a pdf.

private static string ReadPDFText(string name)
{
    try
    {
        var doc = PDDocument.load(name);
        var stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
        return stripper.getText(doc);
    }
    catch
    {
        return "";
    }
}

If you want to log searches for code or perhaps wanted to provide a better UI for search results, then you need to listen to search events with a Visual Studio Addin/VSPackage.

Unfortunately, there still isn’t a direct interface for getting search results… you actually have to copy the text from the UI window…yuck.

Here is some code that does this:

First, setup the find “done” event handler. EnvDTE.FindEvents m_findEvents;

protected override void Initialize()
{
    Trace.WriteLine (string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, "Entering Initialize() of: {0}", this.ToString()));
    base.Initialize();

    var dte = (EnvDTE.DTE)GetService(typeof(EnvDTE.DTE));
    if (dte != null)
    {
       m_findEvents = dte.Events.FindEvents;
       m_findEvents.FindDone += new EnvDTE._dispFindEvents_FindDoneEventHandler(m_findEvents_FindDone);
    }
}