In the past I used HtDig (http://www.htdig.org/) on my Linux desktop. HtDig's latest release is from 2004 and it doesn't support PDF (only Postscript). Also it is not so easy to set up. More recently I tried Strigi but it seems to be very slow. However it has adapters for many file formats including PDF. I don't use MacOS, so I don't know how about the performance of Spotlight.
I think a fast full-text search for the desktop can be very useful. Collecting all those publications doesn't really help when you can't find them when you need them.
Comments
In the past I used HtDig (http://www.htdig.org/) on my Linux desktop. HtDig's latest release is from 2004 and it doesn't support PDF (only Postscript). Also it is not so easy to set up. More recently I tried Strigi but it seems to be very slow. However it has adapters for many file formats including PDF. I don't use MacOS, so I don't know how about the performance of Spotlight.
I think a fast full-text search for the desktop can be very useful. Collecting all those publications doesn't really help when you can't find them when you need them.