Properties of PDF files not found by XP explorer

The Windows Explorer search function does not know how to open and Parse a PDF in order to do a text search. When you change the file extension you're faking out Windows. Making it think that the file might contain plain text. So the search opens the file and looks through all the binary data. If a content stream is not encoded, then the text might appear out in the open so to speak, where search can find it. But then again it might not.

There are third party search engines for window that do proper searches on PDF, suchs as DTSearch.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.html]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.html[/url]

Thom Thanks for the reply. The data is not in the document rather in the file properties which should be visible for a search by windows explorer.

Ahh, well Metadata is always visible as regular text in the file, even when the rest of the PDF is encoded. So it's definately searchable. I just don't think that windows explorer search engine knows enough to look for it.

Have you seen anything that makes you think it should?

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.html]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.html[/url]

It has worked in the past (donot ask me how long ago). In a previous company we used it all the time. Test on a windows XP SP2 shows it working for word(.doc), text(.txt), Access(.mdb), .jpg etc files