Comments on: Add PDF files to Vista’s search index

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:31:42 +0000

There are free ifilters for many other formats. I’ve tried to list them all at http://www.ifilter.org

By: Full Text PDF Search Tool - Noticias externas

Full Text PDF Search Tool - Noticias externas — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 08:10:41 +0000

[...] box from Control Panel, click the Advanced button, and then click "Rebuild." Thanks to Ed Bott's blog for this great [...]

By: Mike Dimmick

Mike Dimmick — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 04:31:39 +0000

Now all you need to do is ditch Adobe’s Reader and install Foxit’s instead. It’s surprising just how bloated Adobe’s Reader is compared to Foxit’s which is doing exactly the same job.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:18:34 +0000

Ed, I will actually try it sometime — I’ve got a couple of guinea pig machines around that I could inflict such a mess on. But I’ll keep this in mind as reference to others who might try the same trick and get bollixed.

BTW, I added the PDF filter – it works great.

By: Ed Bott

Ed Bott — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:01:19 +0000

Serdar, IIRC, the problem was that the system got confused because it couldn’t find the index, and I couldn’t regenerate it. It just threw up a nasty series of error messages. You might want to try that scenario sometime (but do it on a system you don’t care too much about… ).

By: Ed Bott

Ed Bott — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:58:49 +0000

Chris, I just checked a clean install of Vista, and PDF files are not in the index. Do you by any chance have Adobe Reader 8 installed? It appears to add an iFilter. (Version 7 of Reader or Standard adds support for indexing file names but not contents.) I know plenty of people who prefer earlier versions of Reader or who use third-party PDF solutions, and this is a good choice for them.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:44:01 +0000

Ed,

I’m not sure I understand why I need to install this on Vista.
Without doing anything special, my copy of Vista Home Premium seems
to index the contents of PDF files just fine.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:24:05 +0000

That’s interesting — I would think the index wouldn’t have to be restored along with the rest of the system since it could be regenerated from scratch.

By: Ed Bott

Ed Bott — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:16:46 +0000

Serdar, I tried that a while back on one system and had a lot of problems later when I restored a backup, because the index was missing. It was a mess to fix.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:15:15 +0000

Additional suggestion: If you have more than one drive, you can use this as an opportunity to relocate the index to a drive that’s not your system drive. (Under Indexing Options | Advanced, click “Select New” under “Index location”, choose the new location, click OK, reboot. Indexing should begin to rebuild automatically.)