The newest versions of Sphider are (fingers crossed) PHP 8.3 ready. More importantly,, the PHP mbstring extension is now required. In earlier editions, the mbstring functions were emulated. There also has been some code cleanup and standardization.
Sphider currently can index PDF files, DOC, PPT, and XLS files, although a third party utility is needed in a Windows environment. There is consideration that the next edition of Sphider be able to also index DOCX, RTF, and ODT files. If anyone out there thinks this would be useful, let us know.