<p>As far as I know, there is no ready-built solutions available for Craft that makes text in PDFs searchable.</p>

<p>You probably have to look into building this plugin yourself, or hire someone to do it.</p>

<p>Posting in the #jobs channel on Craft's Slack is a good place to start.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-09-20T13:48:49.970Z
Thank you very much. Although I'm not going to hire someone because this would make the project too expensive for my client. Sucks though especially because I'm convincing her to use Craft over Wordpress and she told me "Well in Wordpress I am able to do that so..."

But I'll try harder to persuade her into using tags instead of all the words in a PDF would be more effective.
Jeffrey Stevens
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-09-20T12:35:03.067Z
2017-09-20T12:35:03.067Z
Fred Carlsen
<p>I would also suggest a custom plugin approach. A good starting point would be this package: <a href="https://github.com/smalot/pdfparser" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/smalot/pdfparser</a>. I am mostly including this answer for anyone who happens to find this question and has the ability/inclination to create such a plugin.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-09-21T15:33:55.697Z
2017-09-21T15:33:55.697Z
Julian Fann
<p>It's not as neat as something automated but could add a custom field to your asset type (or if each PDF has an entry, to that entry type) called something like 'PDF Content'. I would probably make it a multi-line plain text field. You can then get your client to copy and paste all the content from the pdf into that field when uploading and use this content to search from.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-09-20T14:09:45.707Z
2017-09-20T14:09:45.707Z
dmatthams
<p>I have a client who wants to search for specific PDF files when she makes use of Craft's search function. The way she wants the PDF's to be found is that the words inside of the PDF is somehow processed by Craft and when you search for certain words that are included in a PDF it will show results of PDF's that contain these search words.</p>

<p>I have Googled for a module that can do such a thing but so far I have no luck. Does anyone know if such a module/plugin exists for Craft or do I need to hire someone to create that for me? </p>

<p>Thank you for reading.</p>

<plugins><search><pdf>
Possibility to use Craft's search function to search in PDF files
# Possibility to use Craft's search function to search in PDF files

(Asked by: username_0 on 2017-09-20)

I have a client who wants to search for specific PDF files when she makes use of Craft's search function. The way she wants the PDF's to be found is that the words inside of the PDF is somehow processed by Craft and when you search for certain words that are included in a PDF it will show results of PDF's that contain these search words.

I have Googled for a module that can do such a thing but so far I have no luck. Does anyone know if such a module/plugin exists for Craft or do I need to hire someone to create that for me?

Thank you for reading.

**Tags:** plugins, search, pdf


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## 3 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2017-09-20. Score: 3 | Accepted answer

As far as I know, there is no ready-built solutions available for Craft that makes text in PDFs searchable.

You probably have to look into building this plugin yourself, or hire someone to do it.

Posting in the #jobs channel on Craft's Slack is a good place to start.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Thank you very much. Although I'm not going to hire someone because this would make the project too expensive for my client. Sucks though especially because I'm convincing her to use Craft over Wordpress and she told me "Well in Wordpress I am able to do that so..."  But I'll try harder to persuade her into using tags instead of all the words in a PDF would be more effective.  

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### Answer by username_2 on 2017-09-21. Score: 3

I would also suggest a custom plugin approach. A good starting point would be this package: <https://github.com/smalot/pdfparser>. I am mostly including this answer for anyone who happens to find this question and has the ability/inclination to create such a plugin.


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### Answer by username_3 on 2017-09-20. Score: 1

It's not as neat as something automated but could add a custom field to your asset type (or if each PDF has an entry, to that entry type) called something like 'PDF Content'. I would probably make it a multi-line plain text field. You can then get your client to copy and paste all the content from the pdf into that field when uploading and use this content to search from.


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