To be able to search for text within PDF files

Question

HI,

I have an ASP .Net Web application and I am working on implementing functionality to search for text within PDF files. Database is SQL Server. I tried out the "Adobe PDF iFilter" which appears to be free. My web application is installed on multiple servers. Does Microsoft recommend the Adobe PDF iFilter or are there any other options?

Thank you.

Answer 1

If your server runs Windows, it is technically possible to use the iFilter to extract text from the PDFs, set up a SQL Server full text index and use that for simple queries. In terms of what's "recommended" though, take a look at Azure Cognitive Search, which is much more powerful and flexible and will, amongst other things, OCR the text in scanned documents and handle most document types, not just PDFs. Not free, but will save a lot of development time!