- March 30, 2012
- FOXITBLOG
The Need for PDF IFilters
PDF has become the overwhelming file format of choice for storing documents on the cloud since it is a robust and open standard for document display and it works with just about any application, hardware device, and operating system. Whether you’re posting a document on the Internet or storing important company documents in an archive, PDF has become a mission critical technology for most organizations.
As a result, the growth in the number of PDF documents has exploded. With all these PDF documents, finding the one you need is like finding a needle in a haystack. Unfortunately, typical search software that you use cannot properly index PDF files since they don’t understand the file format. Indexing is when search engines “crawl” through files to collect and store data so when users perform a search, the performance will be much faster. Luckily most of these search engines support the IFilter architecture – an IFilter is a plugin that allows search engines to index the contents of large numbers of different file formats. When an index is started, the search engine will look in the registry to see if any IFilters exist on that system. Installing a PDF IFilter allows search engines to index PDF files to provide accurate and efficient search of PDF documents and forms.
Performance and Scalability Are Key
Indexing a large amount of files can take a very long time and tie up valuable computing resources, therefore indexing speed is essential. Today’s desktop and server systems come in 64-bit, multi-threaded, multiple core architectures that will dramatically increase performance of software that has been optimized for them. So, it’s important to have a PDF IFilter that takes advantage of the computing power that today’s systems provide. Users will benefit from quick search performance, but the main reward is economic. The scalability and performance reduce the number of servers required, thus reduce customers’ total cost of ownership through decreased costs of server hardware, data center floor space, power and cooling, and administration.
Search for PDF Documents with the Fastest PDF IFilter on the Market
Foxit® PDF IFilter is designed to unleash the computing power of today’s advanced architectures to perform indexes at blazing speeds. Unlike other IFilter products, it takes full advantage of today’s multi-core server architectures, is thread safe, and is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems – making it the absolutely fastest PDF IFilter available. Foxit PDF IFilter extracts data from PDF documents and returns the index results to search engine software. It goes beyond other PDF solutions and indexes content, titles, subjects, authors, keywords, bookmarks, attachments, create time/date, number of pages, and the names of the creating applications. Since it supports ISO 32000-1 (which is based upon PDF 1.7), PDF-A, and Adobe PDF files, it will work with all your existing PDF documents.
Independent tests show just how much faster the Foxit PDF IFilter really is. Check out this blog from Jie Li’s GeekWorld – https://blogs.msdn.com/b/opal/archive/2010/02/09/pdf-ifilter-test-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx