Question: Is it possible to search and index all of my PDF files?

Answer: Yes it is. The first order of business is to make sure that all your PDF files are indeed searchable. Once you know they’re searchable, its time to index them into your database using a full-text search engine.

There are of course differences in PDF file types. Some PDFs are electronically generated and naturally searchable. Other PDF files, such as image PDFs, need to be made searchable via an OCR process.

For image PDFs, the OCR process uses a hidden text layer to encode the text corresponding to each image page. There are numerous OCR software packages to make your image PDFs searchable, though accuracy and size of the resulting PDFs are important factors in selecting the right software for your Company.

Some databases with older search engines may have some trouble indexing on image PDFs with hidden text. This can often be corrected for by updating to the latest version of the database and the latest release version of the search engine.