Eric Legault: Indexing Adobe PDF Files in SPS 2003

Continuing on the topic of PDF files in Sharepoint, Eric Legault has a post on how to get the PDF files indexed so they show up in search.

As you may know, SharePoint includes filters to index many file types (Office docs, web pages, Tiff images, Visio diagrams, XML, etc.). What's missing out of the box is the ability to index Adobe Acrobat files. However, Adobe does provide a free IFilter for download at https://www.adobe.com/support/salesdocs/1043a.htm. This IFilter works for both SharePoint 2001 and 2003 and will scan readable text in Acrobat files for indexing.

Thanks to RobertK for the tip!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2004
  I have a good amount of experience using IFilter with Index Server for a WebDAV-based approach we are using.
  
  One problem with Adobe's IFilter is that it doesn't search the WSS streams, so you can't search custom metadata properties like you could on Office documents etc.
  
  If the document is encrypted (ie read-only), it doesn't index the text either.
  
  From our experience with it, it's also an unfinished product that I'm told they may drop support for in the future. As it is, it's a product they have one developer not quite part-time on.
  
  Quite disappointing :(
• Anonymous
  January 22, 2004
  Sorry, scratch unfinished...