Newer versions of Recoll (from 1.17) normally use WebKit HTML widgets for the result list and the snippets window (this may be disabled at build time). Total customisation is possible with full support for CSS and Javascript. Conversely, there are limits to what you can do with the older Qt QTextBrowser, but still, it is possible to decide what data each result will contain, and how it will be displayed.
The result list presentation can be exhaustively customized by adjusting two elements:
The paragraph format
HTML code inside the header section. For versions 1.21 and later, this is also used for the snippets window
The paragraph format and the header fragment can be edited from the Result list tab of the GUI configuration.
The header fragment is used both for the result list and
the snippets window. The snippets list is a table and has a
snippets class attribute. Each paragraph in
the result list is a table, with class
respar, but this can be changed by editing
the paragraph format.
There are a few examples on the page about customising the result list on the Recoll web site.
This is an arbitrary HTML string where the following printf-like
% substitutions will be performed:
%A. Abstract
%D. Date
%I. Icon image name. This is normally determined from the MIME type. The associations are defined inside the
mimeconfconfiguration file. If a thumbnail for the file is found at the standard Freedesktop location, this will be displayed instead.%K. Keywords (if any)
%L. Precooked Preview, Edit, and possibly Snippets links
%M. MIME type
%N. result Number inside the result page
%P. Parent folder Url. In the case of an embedded document, this is the parent folder for the top level container file.
%R. Relevance percentage
%S. Size information
%T. Title or Filename if not set.
%t. Title or Filename if not set.
%U. Url
The format of the Preview, Edit, and Snippets links is
<a href="P%N">,
<a href="E%N">
and
<a href="A%N">
where docnum (%N) expands to the document
number inside the result page).
A link target defined as "F%N" will open
the document corresponding to the %P parent
folder expansion, usually creating a file manager window on the
folder where the container file resides. E.g.:
<a href="F%N">%P</a>
A link target defined as
R%N| will
run the corresponding script on the result file (if the document is
embedded, the script will be started on the top-level parent).
See the section about
defining scripts.scriptname
In addition to the predefined values above, all strings
like %(fieldname) will be replaced by the
value of the field named fieldname for this
document. Only stored fields can be accessed in this way, the
value of indexed but not stored fields is not known at this
point in the search process
(see field
configuration). There are currently very few fields
stored by default, apart from the values above
(only author
and filename), so this feature will need
some custom local configuration to be useful. An example
candidate would be the recipient field
which is generated by the message input handlers.
The default value for the paragraph format string is:
"<table class=\"respar\">\n"
"<tr>\n"
"<td><a href='%U'><img src='%I' width='64'></a></td>\n"
"<td>%L <i>%S</i> <b>%T</b><br>\n"
"<span style='white-space:nowrap'><i>%M</i> %D</span> <i>%U</i> %i<br>\n"
"%A %K</td>\n"
"</tr></table>\n"
You may, for example, try the following for a more web-like experience:
<u><b><a href="P%N">%T</a></b></u><br> %A<font color=#008000>%U - %S</font> - %L
Note that the P%N link in the above paragraph makes the title a preview link. Or the clean looking:
<img src="%I" align="left">%L <font color="#900000">%R</font> <b>%T&</b><br>%S <font color="#808080"><i>%U</i></font> <table bgcolor="#e0e0e0"> <tr><td><div>%A</div></td></tr> </table>%K
These samples, and some others are on the web site, with pictures to show how they look.
It is also possible to define the value of the snippet separator inside the abstract section.
