Wouldn’t it be great if there were a tool that could index the PDF files saved on your hard drive, and then allow you to search for files containing specific phrases? Even better if it could identify all the other files topically related to whichever document you happened to be viewing.

Such were my thoughts in 2018, when I returned to the topics of phrase indexing and document relationships. (Perhaps I could develop my own personal PDF indexing and navigation solution?) I’d first thought about such things some two decades earlier, when I was a publishing technologist working on a…