topic Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs in Alfresco Archive

Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:09:05 GMT

Hi,I've just installed Alfresco Labs 3b for testing and have uploaded a PDF file to a document library. Does share have full text search capabilities and should it extend to PDFs? When I search for something that is in the PDF I don't get any results.Justin.

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:25:46 GMT

I tried in the Alfresco application as well (http:\\mysite\alfresco) but it didn't work there either. Is there something I need to do to enable full text searching?

Justin.

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:34:32 GMT

Well Labs 3c doesn't work either…Wonder if the enterprise version does…

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 07:32:47 GMT

No luck with Enterprise 3.0 either. Doesn't work with either PDFs or Word 2007 files, only with straight text files which isn't overly useful. Back to Sharepoint I guess.

Justin.

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

mikeh — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 08:48:51 GMT

Alfresco relies on third party libraries for content transformations: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Content_Transformations
For Office files, you need to have OpenOffice installed to do the conversion.

Not sure why your PDF indexing isn't working - it should be handled by pdfbox. Are there any error relating to transformation in the log?

Mike

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:50:33 GMT

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the response. I wasn't expecting that Word documents would work without some effort, but I thought PDFs should work out of the box. The enterprise version seems to have installed OpenOffice for me do I still need to do something for it to do content transformations on Word docs?

I've looked in alfresco.log and don't see any errors in there. I've enabled the two logging categories mentioned in the link you posted, is there something else I need to enable to track this down?

Justin.

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

ivo_costa — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:30:34 GMT

Hi jclacherty

the pdf file you're using might not have the text layer, and so although you can read it your-self, you're actually looking at a photograph (I've read somewhere that this is how PDFs work)

I guess that some pdf generators just do this the wrong way…

I have a few pdfs that work and a few others that don't work at all, you could try to find an pdfocr program to check if this is the problem

Regards

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:12:11 GMT

Hi Ivo,

I used Acrobat and had it OCR the file when I scanned it. I can do text searches from within Acrobat so I assume there's a text layer.

Justin.

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

ivo_costa — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:09:22 GMT

Hi jclacherty

just tested it once again and it's working for me with Alfresco 3.0E

are you searching for a full word?? if you're searching for a partial you must add "*" to the search string
for my test I just created a document using OpenOffice and exported it to PDF using the built-in PDF creator

Can you run a few tests and help the community give something back to Alfresco???

Best Regards

edit: on the word issue, I think that OpenOffice still doesn't support the docx format, but doc (xp/2003) should be fine

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:43:16 GMT

Hi Ivo,

Happy to do testing but I do need direction as I'm unfamiliar with Alfresco. I have been searching for a full word. The document was created by Acrobat 9, perhaps it's a versioning problem. I'll try to create another one but save it as an earlier pdf version.

And thanks on the Word update.

Justin.

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:49:55 GMT

I created another PDF by printing to PDF from within Word (using Acrobat) and this didn't work either. However, I uploaded a datasheet in PDF format and it worked fine so I'm guessing it has something to do with PDFs created by Acrobat 9. The PDF I created in Word was supposed to be in Acrobat 6 format…

Justin.

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

jclacherty — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:09:32 GMT

I've done some more debugging. It only seems to work with PDF-1.3 documents (Acrobat 4.0), anything above this is not searchable and also does not have a thumbnail created.

Another interesting problem is that the search only works with PDF documents if the document is in the root document folder, this is not the case for straight text files. So I have a site called Accounts, and in the document library I have a folder called Bills. If I upload a PDF-1.3 file into the Bills folder then a search on text that is in the PDF returns no results. If I move it back a directory to the root folder of the document library then the search works fine. Uploading a text file to the Bills folder and then searching on words that are contained in it return that file in the search.

Can someone else confirm this please?

Justin.

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

protenus — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:17:29 GMT

–BUMP–

We have been seeing similar problems, can someone confirm this, and any ideas how to get this working?

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

ivo_costa — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:37:39 GMT

Hi all

this problem seams to be related to the reindexing speed, (root vs folder)
at first I thought that I had the same problem, but after a few minutes when I tried to find the file I as unexpectedly successful

please check this out

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

amernet — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 02:03:37 GMT

Hi,

Wonder if anyone has more update on the content transformation improvement for Adobe Acrobat 9?
I have the same problem with PDFs created by Adobe Acrobat 9.

We use Alfresco Labs 3 Final. Test both Adobe Acrobat 8 and 9 documents.
The Acrobat 8 works but Acrobat 9 can't be searched and thumbnail was missing as well.

Any advise is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Charles

Re: Unable to do full text searches on PDFs

amernet — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:17:21 GMT

Hi,

This issue is still continuing from version 3.0.

We just installed/upgraded the latest 3.2 and still having the same problem with pdf document scanned and created by Abobe Acrobat 9 professional.

I have read all the comments above and wonder if any other user can help us to resolve this issue. Within Adobe 9, I can search all the hidden text.

If I need to save to different PDF type. Can someone share what format standard I should use?

In the Adobe Acrobat 9. such as Optimized PDF, PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/X

I tried PDF/E but still no luck!

Thanks!

Charles