In MOSS 2007, I am finding that custom columns in Document Libraries are not being crawled (or not being indexed) for PDF documents, but the same columns (or properties) are crawled and indexed for MS Office documents. The Managd properties are tied up to the Crawled Properties.

I have a custom Advanced Search and Search Results page using a FullTextSqlQuery search. After much head-scratching at the fact that too few results were being returned when searching within properties, I realised that no PDF results are returned when using custom columns as properties. Looking at it the other way around, none of the properties that are returned from the FullTextSqlQuery are available when the search results are PDF files.

It appears that the contents of the PDFs are being indexed correctly.

Could there be something simple that I am missing, or is this an inherent problem, to do with the fact that the indexing is handled by the Adobe iFilter?

Hi Mike,

I am trying to involve someone familiar with this topic to further look at this issue.

Thanks,
Daniel Yang
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Hi Mike Atkins,

let me distinct between the keyword and the .pdf file crawling and indexing. 

for crawling .pdf file, so the result we can search for the .pdf file, we need iFilter to make Sharepoint recognize the .pdf files. we need to check some registry and add some settings, so that sharepont will be able to search for the .pdf file.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2564792/en-us

for the content of the .pdf, sharepoint will need to do full crawl, and it is based on the iFilter to read the contents. as i remember, when early version of iFilter may not able to index the content of the .pdf. then the result was we could search for the files and we couldn't search for the .pdf content.

as i see from your post, seems you have a reversal situation, not able to search for the .pdf, so i assume you already have the iFilter installed, and seems you need to cross check with the settings that configure the registry settings. but, if there were modification regarding the file name of the .pdf, then you just need to re-full-crawl your environment.