It has been a while since we installed the Adobe PDF IFilter for MOSS 2007 or Search Server 2008. This is in part because Foxit Software (http://www.foxitsoftware.com) released a 64-bit PDF IFilter for SharePoint before Adobe did and because clients have been gravitating towards 64-bit SharePoint Server Farms for a while now. In any case, I had to revisit the installation for a new client and came across a couple of things I thought would be good to share.
First, the IFilter installation document found here:
http://www.adobe.com/special/acrobat/configuring_pdf_ifilter_for_ms_sharepoint_2007.pdf
instructs you to verify that the PDF settings are correct in the registry. Specifically, the value of this key:
\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf
should be {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}.
The installation in this case supplied another GUID so I assumed it was correct and the documentation was outdated. However, after the crawl executed it was clear something was wrong. The crawl logs stated that although items were crawled, “the filtering process could not process this item. This might be because you do not have the latest file filter for this type of item. Install the corresponding filter”.
Tip: Change the GUID in the .pdf registry setting to the GUID in the documentation.
After having done this, resetting the content indexes and restarting the crawl the PDF content was indexed as expected.
Second, in case you are looking for the 17x17 pdf icon that I think should be installed in the 12 hive TEMPLATE\IMAGES but isn’t, you can download it here:
http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html
Look for it near the bottom of the page.