Jon Morisi shows how to use Full-Text Search to read PDF files:
Faced with this very issue, I decided to setup a local SQL Server Full-Text Search.
Some of the cool things Full-Text Search will give you, over and above, a standard search include the following:
- One or more specific words or phrases (simple term)
- A word or a phrase where the words begin with specified text (prefix term)
- Inflectional forms of a specific word (generation term)
- A word or phrase close to another word or phrase (proximity term)
- Synonymous forms of a specific word (thesaurus)
- Words or phrases using weighted values (weighted term)
In order to get stared with the setup, it’s important to know that the Full-Text Search architecture relies on filters for searching various file types. This is important for this example because the PDF filter is not installed by default. So, for starters, we need to go download and install the PDF ifilter(PDFFilter64Setup.msi).
Up until I read this blog post, I had no idea that full-text search could index PDFs, so that’s very interesting.