To be able to search for text within PDF files

Sunil 26 Reputation points
2020-05-13T14:04:09.313+00:00

HI,

I have an ASP .Net Web application and I am working on implementing functionality to search for text within PDF files. Database is SQL Server. I tried out the "Adobe PDF iFilter" which appears to be free. My web application is installed on multiple servers. Does Microsoft recommend the Adobe PDF iFilter or are there any other options?

Thank you.

Azure App Service
Azure App Service
Azure App Service is a service used to create and deploy scalable, mission-critical web apps.
7,679 questions
0 comments

1 answer

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Mark Allan 421 Reputation points
    2020-05-13T15:12:50.17+00:00

    If your server runs Windows, it is technically possible to use the iFilter to extract text from the PDFs, set up a SQL Server full text index and use that for simple queries. In terms of what's "recommended" though, take a look at Azure Cognitive Search, which is much more powerful and flexible and will, amongst other things, OCR the text in scanned documents and handle most document types, not just PDFs. Not free, but will save a lot of development time!

Your answer

Answers can be marked as Accepted Answers by the question author, which helps users to know the answer solved the author's problem.