Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

  One of the greatest features of SharePoint in my opinion has always been the search capability, but out of the box you cannot index the content of PDF documents but the ability to achieve this is freely available with the Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms, the documentation for installing this is also available on the Adobe website but has not yet been updated for SharePoint 2010.

 So through this post I will show how to install and configure the iFilter for PDF, the first step is to make sure the PDF icon shows up  when you upload a PDF file if not how to achieve this is here.

 You may also wish to check out this post if every time you click on a PDF it only offers a save button.

 So now we have covered all the prerequisites we can now continue with our configuration. Once the iFilter is downloaded extract the MSI installer file and install this on your SharePoint servers.

The next step is to navigate to Central Admin | Manage service applications | Search Service Application and once there click on “file types” to add the PDF file type.

The next step is to make a registry change so as always be careful as this can have an adverse effects on your server if you make a mistake. First of all start up regedit and navigate to:- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\Filters, right click on the filters folder and create a new key and enter ‘.pdf’ as the value do not forget the full stop. Next enter the following values to your new key:-

<REG_SZ> Default = <value not set>
<REG_SZ> Extension = pdf
<REG_DWORD> FileTypeBucket = 1
<REG_SZ> MimeTypes = application/pdf

You should end up with the new key as illustrated below

Next navigate to

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OfficeServer\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension  

Just one key to enter here, right click and choose new key and again enter ‘.PDF’ as the value double click on the default REG_SZ and enter {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} as the value data.

 The final step is to restart your SharePoint server and initiate a full crawl, all of your PDF files will now be indexed and searchable.

Dave

If you have your nice SP2010 setup you may notice that when you go to open a PDF file it prompts you to save it rather than opening.

This is really annoying and would send everyone here at the school completely bananas! Not to mention the fact that we try to get everything on SharePoint only to force people to save it to their own area!

Never fear there is a solution. It’s in central admin.

Go there and click ‘Manage Web Applications’

Click on the web app you want to change, and go to ‘General Settings’

Scroll down the list until you reach ‘Browser File Handling’

Change the radio box from Strict to Permissive.

Click ok.

Go back to your PDF document and click on it – and it will open up without forcing you to save it somewhere first.

You may have noticed in the first screen shot there was no PDF icon. Well, follow this guide to right that wrong!