Indexing PDFs on SharePoint 2007

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SharePoint comes with it's challenges for smaller deployments of SharePoint 2007, one of those challenges is indexing of PDF's and other non-Office documents.

The Adobe iFilter required for PDF indexing comes in both a 32 & 64 bit variety, however, the 32 bit is pretty much useless for server applications. It is designed for use on desktops primarily & can only index a single PDF document at a time. If you're going to index PDF's with SharePoint, you need to be running the indexing service on a 64-bit machine.

So what if you're single server deployment of SharePoint is already running on a 32-bit version of Windows Server? I would recommend either upgrading to 64-bit, or if that is cost prohibitive, you can look to third party solutions. The Foxit PDF iFilter for Server, comes in both a 32 & 64 bit versions and indexes PDF's better than the Adobe iFilter. There is a cost associated with Foxit PDF iFilter. At the time of this posting, it was running about $700 per server. That's actually pretty close to the cost of just going out and buying a new Windows Server 2008 R2 (64bit) license, but even with that, you won't be able to achieve the indexing performance Foxit provides.

Installing Foxit PDF IFilter

Installation is a fairly straight forward process.

First you'll want to obtain an icon to use to identify PDF files. While you can choose any icon, it's best to stick with the Adobe standard, unless your environment uses a different PDF reader. The idea is to use an icon that is easily identifiable to your users.

Adobe Icons & Web Logos: http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html#pdficon
NOTE: These icons are in PNG format. You may want to open them in an image editor, and re-save them in GIF format to ensure all clients / browsers can render the image properly.

1. Stop IIS, From the command prompt, type: "net stop w3svc"
2. Copy the desired PDF icon to "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Template\Images".
3. Open to edit the file, "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Template\XML\DOCICON.XML"
4. Add a new entry in the <ByExtensions> section of the XML file, "<Mapping Key="pdf" Value="pdficon_small.gif"/>"
5. Save and close the DOCICON.XML file.
6. Now, unzip the Foxit PDF Filter, download, and run the setup program.
7. Start IIS, From the command prompt, type: "net start w3svc"

Assuming you already have an indexing job configured to run, (and haven't excluded PDF files) then the job should begin to index PDF's on the next full crawl. 

Pacific MIST Inc, nor this blog author has any affiliation with or receives any compensation from FoxIT Corporation.

SharePoint 2007, MOSS, Index, IFilter, PDF, Search, Microsoft