Foxit PDF IFilter is designed to help users to index a large amount of PDF documents and then quickly find text within these documents. The PDF documents can be files, email attachments or database records.

Foxit PDF IFilter supports following Microsoft products: Windows Indexing Service, MSN Desktop Search, Internet Information Server, SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), Site Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server and all other products based on Microsoft Search technology. Hereafter, we use term "search engine" to refer to these products.

Foxit PDF IFilter acts as a plug-in for full-text search engines. A search engine usually works in two steps:

Step 1, the search engine goes through a designated place, e.g. a file folder or a database, and indexes all documents or newly modified documents, including PDF documents, in the background and creates internal data to store indexing result.

Step 2, a user specifies some keywords he would like to search and the search engine answers the query immediately by looking up the indexing result and responds to the user with all the documents that contains the keywords.

During Step 1, the search engine itself doesn't understand format of a PDF document. Therefore, it looks in windows registry for an appropriate PDF IFilter and finds the Foxit PDF IFilter. Foxit PDF IFilter understands PDF format. It filters out embedded formatting and extracts text from the document and return text back to the search engine. Further information about IFilter specification can be found on the Microsoft Web site.

Key benefits:

• Integrates with existing operating systems and tools within your company
• Provides an easy solution to search within PDF documents located on local computer, local network and intranet
• Greatly increases your ability to accurately locate information
• Much smaller and faster than IFilter offered by other vendors
• Supports Chinese/Japanese/Korean PDF documents
• Supports native 64-bit code
• Supports multi-threading and takes full use of multiple-CPU in a server

Download

Installation Instructions

Follow the steps below to install the Foxit PDF IFilter.

• 1. Download PDF IFilter.
• 2. Stop all appropriate clients.
• 3. Uninstall any previous version of Foxit PDF IFilter.
• 4. Double-click the downloaded file and follow the on-screen instructions.
• 5. After the installation completes, start all appropriate clients.
• 6. (SharePoint only) Add PDF as a file type to be included in the content index.
• 7. Re-index your system with the appropriate clients.

Additional notes

Foxit PDF IFilter has no user interface. Since Foxit PDF IFilter acts as a plug-in for various search engines, it is the search engine that is responsible for interpreting the returned text and then presenting the information to the user.

The installation package will unzip a language file called fpdfcjk.bin into the installation folder. This file will help you index PDF documents containing Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters.

Currently, we are testing Foxit IFilter for IA64 version. It will become available pretty soon.