Diary of a Techie

Taking off from the tip given to me by Steven Sofian, I decided to test out the inclusion of PDFs in the search index of sharepoint. Prior to this, only microsoft word, excel and office documents were searchable on sharepoint search results.

The best instructions on how to do this came from : http://workerthread.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/configure-pdf-ifilter-in-wss-30/

First, you need to download the Adobe PDF IFilter 6.0, which you can find at this URL. You should also get hold of a suitable Icon to use with PDFs, so that when they are listed in a document library they are easily recognisable. There is a 17 x 17 one available on the Adobe web site here.

Once you’ve downloaded the IFilter, install it on your WSS 3.0 server, and then follow the instructions on registry settings in Microsoft KB Article 927675. I’ve always found that providing the Adobe IFilter installed properly, the only setting I need to add is the Search Extensions one listed in step 2.

Also note step 5 re stopping and re-starting the search service.

Now you need to set up the Icon file. If you downloaded the icon file in step 1 above, you will have a file called pdficon_small.gif. You need to copy this onto your WSS 3.0 server, into drive:\Program Files\Common FIles\Microsoft Shared\Web Server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES.

Next you need to edit the XML file which WSS uses to link file extensions to icons. This file is called DOCICON.XML and is located at drive:\Program Files\Common FIles\Microsoft Shared\Web Server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML. Navigate to that folder and locate the file. I would suggest making a backup copy first, then opening the file in NotePad.

You need to add a mapping key for PDFs at the bottom of the file, above the closing tag. The new key will be (note that XML is case sensitive so make sure you use same case as previous entries). Then save the file.
That’s pretty much it, but if you already have PDFs uploaded to your WSS server I would recommend starting a full crawl.

You can do the with STSAdm, the command syntax is Stsadm -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart . More on this on TechNet here.

Filed under: Computing, Sharepoint