keywords in libreoffice writer
 

In order to manage a pile of LibreOffice Writer documents, I want to assign keywords to individual documents, and then search the entire directory for the documents that carry that particular keyword. Can this be done?

If you go to File->Properties->Description->Keywords you can add such metadata to your document.

Then for retrieval, Recoll might be an option. If it does not work out of the box for the OpenDocument Format's metadata, then the filters can be modified. In many cases such a modification is not too hard.

Thanks, Turbocapitalist! I will check out Recoll, but I might be back asking for more help.

I have downloaded Recoll, but will take some time getting the hang of it. Meanwhile, I have learnt how to add Keywords to documents in LibreOffice Writer - for which, many thanks.

Now, using Recoll, is it possible to search among a pile of documents using only the Keyword field, or would one be doing a full-text search?

The initial indexing will take a long time. You can limit which directories it indexes or exclude specific subdirectories to speed that up.

Once indexed, you can do various kinds of searches. You can do a faceted search by going to the search bar in Recoll, selecting Query Language in the pull-down menu, and then entering the specific query there including any fields you wish to single out, such as keyword.

That query will find documents labelled with "xyzzy" in the keyword field but ignore the string elsewhere in other fields or the body text. Recoll should have a full user manual available via the Help menu. It can go into more faceted searching and the query language in much better detail.

And of course it is possible to do a faceted search combined with full text, etc.