Windows 10: Searching PDF's

Hi, thanks for you help. I do a lot of research for topics in economics and philosophy. Many of the resources that I use are in the public domain. I am trying to find a convenient way to download this documents to my computer and maintain them in a searchable form. One of the easiest formats to find these documents is PDF, but PDF is not easily searchable to my knowledge with the software that I have available.

I have Windows 10 and Office online (Office 365?)

Can anyone make suggestions regarding techniques, formats or software?

Thank you.


:)

 

Error - explorer.exe - the data area passed to a system call is too small

I had this problem in explorer.exe after searching for a .pdf file.

Instead of opening the .pdf file directly from the search results, right click on the .pdf file, open file location, then open the file.

 

Microsoft Print to PDF, troublesome T attribute

Use BulkFileChanger (from Nirsoft) or PowerShell command to unset "T" attribute. More here:

Windows Search Not Listing Microsoft Print to PDF Files - The Winhelponline Blog :

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/search-not-indexing-pdf-ms-print-to-pdf/

Related Links

MS Print to PDF adds the "T" (temporary) attribute when writing to PDF which causes Windows Search to skip the file.

Microsoft Print to PDF, troublesome T attribute

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/103237

fsutil | oasysadmin

 

I always use Adobe Reader for PDF files on my Windows 10 machine;

PDF reader, PDF viewer | Adobe Acrobat Reader DC

 

Hello, I expect you are aware that there are different types of pdfs. Some are image based- so the text page is a picture, and so not editable or searchable.

You can convert such pdf's to searchable pdfs using e.g. Abbyy Finereader or Paperport.. or other software capable of OCR.

Note that Windows search using explorer will search text based pdf's where the folder they are in has been indexed.
Advanced Query Syntax (Windows)

Your search text has to be in ""
This is probably little known.

Example:




If I simply entered *.pdf I would get a lot of files.
This does not work where the folder is not in the Indexing Options (see Control Panel).

Tools like Google Desktop Search (not supported, still works) can maintain an 'instantly' searchable index.