Steven Van de Craen's Blog

After hours of troubleshooting the Foxit x64 PDF IFilter is finally indexing the PDF files on our WSS 3.0 installation. Thanks a lot!

This is GREAT!. What about TIFF Files?

The out of the box TIFF indexing from SPS2003 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837847) has been removed from MOSS 2007. I have picked up the following rumor: http://blogs.msdn.com/ifilter/archive/2006/11/30/recent-ifilter-implementation-and-deployment-questions.aspx#4161780

Also consider iFilter Shop's PDF+ iFilter. Like FoxIt, not free for servers, but unlike FoxIt, PDF+ can expose custom embedded metadata for indexing by MOSS. Plus iFilter Shop has great support.

Thanks, Steven - That really helped a lot.

Thanks Stevan for this post

Worked like a charm - thanks for the post!

I don't undertand the foxit step for WSS, the old value and new value for GUIDs are the same??

Good catch, John ! I've updated it but what matters is the new value anyway :)

I've followed all the instructions I can find on this topic and still and not seeing and pdf results returned from my search. Difference for me is the pdfs I want scaned are on a separate file server which has been defined as a Search Content Source. Does the IFilter install have to be applied to the file server on which the pdfs reside as well? Any help much appreciated.

Do you get results (from the file share) when searching on filename ? If not then the search is misconfigured.

Yes, I do get results when searching for a filename or part of a filename within that search scope.

Peter, did you ever find a solution ?

I get pdfs with icons returned in searches, for example, 'pdf' or when searching be the pdf document name. I do not get any content indexed.

If they were indexed before the iFilter installation they might not be picked up again. Try reseting all crawled content and do a full crawl. (Not the best solution if you have a lot of indexed data but yeah)

Steven, thank you for your advice here. I have one problem - Sharepoint is indexing the pdf files but not their content. The ifilter seems to be installed correctly because I ran ifilttst on my system and it extracted all data. However, the search does still not return any results unless i search for the file name itself. Do you know why it is not searching the content? Do i need to map any metadata properties for pdf's? thanks Joel

Joel, did you add the 'pdf' extension to crawled file types ? Also, if they're already indexed before ifilter installation then you might need to reset all crawled content and do a full crawl. No additional action is required.

Can anyone tell me whether SECURED PDFs are crawled? That is, I have uploaded into a MOSS doc library several PDFs that were generated with PDF security enabled to prevent selection, copy, print, etc. Will this preculde the indexing service (with PDF iFilter installed and configured properly) from crawling content the secured PDFs? Many thanks in advance, Michael C.

thank you for share so detail steps very useful!!

Great Post, worked like a champ! Thanks!

Hi, I have tried everything you have asked above but still the icon is still plain white and PDF files are opening in Internet Explorer, can you please please help me.

Make sure you followed the instructions and don't forget to do an iisreset.

Hi, Is there any way to run the full crawl for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 from the command prompt?

Hi, Joel or Michael or anyone else have you found your solution to index/crawling content within PDF files? I have everything configured as to what is documented here http://www.adobe.com/special/acrobat/configuring_pdf_ifilter_for_ms_sharepoint_2007.pdf. thanks

Mike, what do the crawl logs mention about a random PDF file in your environment after a Full crawl ?

Thanks for the icon :D Working great with Adobe Reader 9 8-)

Hello, my problem is strange. After installing ifilter (32bit, v9),search is searching content of pdf's only after full crawl. When i upload a file and run incremental crawl, in crawl logs i see this pdf as 'searched'. But when i try to search any phrase from it, results are empty. After full crawl, i can search all content from it..

I have made these edits, and I can search inside pdf content. But I have a problem in the returned search result, the pdf document returned like that "Microsoft Word - pdfFileName.doc" although it has the pdf icon, and when click it opened by acrobat reader. thanks in advance

Amira, maybe the title or name (in the PDF or in SharePoint) is set to 'Microsoft Word...' ?

Hi you say that not instaling any ifilter makes sharepoint index the metadata. Because this is exactly what we need, I hvae tried this, but unfortunatly I could not get this working. I just added the pdf file type and started afull crawl. Do I need to to do anything else (I have moss 2007 sp2 with lots of pdf's and only need metadata search (through managed props) Any advice much appreciated!! Sander

We plan to install a pdf-iFilter. Is it possible to install it in a WinServer2008R2-Environment with MOSS2007 SP2? Are there any experiences? Or think to note? Thanks for your answer!

Trine, the Adobe PDF iFilter v6 is the only one that doesn't explicitly mention it supports Windows 2008, but even so I believe it will be no real issue. If you have x64 there's no problem because that requires the v9 iFilter from Adobe, or the Foxit one which both support W2008. Installation instructions are identical as to described above. Good luck!

Hi Steven, thanks a lot for your answer! Yes, we i'll try and see... :-)

Please note that upgrade process like sp2 or cumulative upgrade will reset the GUID to the adobe 32 bit Ifilter and this, even on a 64 bit machine. After the upgrade, ifilter will stop on 64 bits because of this. You will need to go and reset the registry key as per procedure in this post.

I have the icon for pdfs, but when the pdf s are displayed in a doc library that shows title instead of file name, the title is blank, eventhough the pdfs have titles. Any ideas what may be causing this?

Hi Steven, I am a SharePoint Developer and working on a project where Clients wants to Index the content Inside PDF documents. I don't have much experience with SharePoint Search but I can understand Using Ifilter I can search content inside PDF document. I am using 64 bit windows 2008 server (MOSS 2007 and have Enterprise Search) and I am aware Ifilter version 9 is available. Can you give me few tips please? Should I install new version of IFilter? If yes do I need to change the Registry the same way you explain? or something new I have to do? Do I need to have latest version of Adobe If I use Latest Ifilter on server or doesn't matter of client's machine's version? I will really appreciate if you can reply me. It will help me a lot. Thanks a lot. Cheers, Mrin

Mike, the Title field must be filled in as SharePoint metadata, they are not automatically promoted from the title property in the PDF document, that functionality only works with Office file formats. Doesn't relate to Search or iFilter by the way.

Mrin, the iFilter must be installed on the SharePoint server following the above instructions. Some steps only apply if you have x64 server environment and others are different depending on the iFilter you are using. An iFilter will do nothing more that read the text from a PDF document and give it to the indexer so that it is stored, it works with both older and newer PDF file types. You don't need to match the version of iFilter and Reader for it to work. HTH, Steven

Thanks! I couldn't find ICPDF.GIF so I made my own with Paint.Net.

Very informative...solved my problem. Thanks!!

Great tip about SP2 resetting the GUID for the .pdf extension. I got burned by this one.... Thanks Carl

Well how do you see the status of the WSS 3.0 crawl. I don't see some of the pdf documents in search if it is in subsite. Though I see many pdf documents in site collection. http://www.ekhichdi.com/a/WSS-3.0-PDF-search-results-not-working-106.html

Thanks, it’s really useful.

Hi Steve, I followed the complete process listed above. Now when I crawl, the pdf's do get crawled but won't give any results when I try to search content from any pdf file. I restarted the machine as well. What could be the issue ? Thanks, Tejas

Hi Tejas, really depends. Do new pdf files get crawled ? What do the crawl logs say ? Which SP version ? x64 ?

Does iFilter require Adobe Reader pre-installed on the Indexing or WFE?

Hi Sameer, installing the iFilter is all that's required. Then do the configuration steps.

Hi Steven, My env is Moss 2007 and i have installed the ifilter and followed the configuration steps. Now pdf documents are showed in search results. But i observed that, in my Document library i had 200000 + pdf docs out of which only 100000 + docs are getting indexed. Kindly let me know whether im missing some thing.

Hi Geetha, if you're getting results the PDF iFilter is working. Search the Crawl Logs for information on those 'missing' documents. If they show with a warning or error message that would be helpful.

Hi Steven, thanks for your prompt reply. I think i should re phrase my question, My document library has some 200 k pdf documents, out of which only 100k are showing up in the results. i wrote a test webpart to count the no of documents showed for each document type. I checked with Crawl logs there were nearly 50 errors in it which is not related to pdf documents. The errors are shown for word document and even those documents are searchable. I have configured a content source to search my sharpeoint site collection, and i defined a scope for this specified document library. this scope is returning 100k + results, where my entire output should be 210k results. Do let me know if u need further info about these. Also in addition to that my document library has several file types which includes jpg, png, pdf, doc, xls. out of which pdf is the majority doc type. Other document types jpg and png is coming in the search results are desired. Even i observed that, few of doc and xls are also not coming in results. But the diff is very minimum. Only pdf is having this problem. Also let me know how can i cross check whether all my documents are coming in search results.

Hi Geetha, sure they're not filtered for being duplicates ? Might be best if you post your issue to the MSDN forums to get a broader reach of help.