Can Flare search PDFs?

[jobo]

Our top nav help has standalone single-source topics and topics with links to PDFs. We have added the PDFs to the project in the Content Explorer and link directly to them there. We want to be able to search these PDFs in our compiled help.

Questions:
* How can we get Flare's search engine to include the PDF content in a search?
* If Flare can't do that, what tools or workarounds do you use?

Thanks!

[jobo]

bump bump bump bump bump bump

[roboHAL]

jobo, if you mean search for content inside the PDF, no can do. At one point the notion of using WebHelp Plus along with some sort of Microsoft Indexing strategy/server was thought to handle this, but I don't think it was widely used because it really didn't work. The best you can do is search for some text you would use to identify or title the PDF.

[jobo]

Looks like it is possible, but only if you are NOT using the Top Nav skin. Here's the answer I got from tech support:

The native Flare search engine does not have the capability to search non-XHTML files embedded in your project. In order to search the content of a PDF, you can enable Server Based Output. This would disable the Flare search functionality and rely on Windows search algorithm. This also requires additional settings to be enabled on the production server.

For more information on how to set this up, use the following links to articles in our online help.

• http://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare12/ ... enario.htm
• http://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare12/ ... Output.htm

[roboHAL]

jobo, that's basically the WebHelp Plus "solution" I indicated. Try it and best of luck, but I wouldn't count on it actually working. Hit or miss at best. To test, set Windows indexing on or off, your choice. Set any other windows "preference". Then place a PDF inside a folder and use the windows search capability via explore to locate text inside the PDF and see if windows can recognize the PDF.

[RamonS]

A loooong time back I used swish-e for indexing PDFs and other files. You can use that for creating the index and then write your on js based search that combines swish-e output and the search from Flare. Not trivial and not coming out of any box.

[LeeD]

I've used ZOOM Search http://www.wrensoft.com/index.html by Wrensoft in the past, when RoboHelp's search was awful. At the time, ZOOM was a robust product, and completely dependable. I've looked at their website recently, and their V7 is showing a full list of file types that you can run it on (HTML, PDF, PPT, etc.).

Once you set up your CSS for the search form, you run ZOOM on any or all of the output you want processed.

Good luck,
Leon

[jobo]

Thanks Leon, that looks promising! I'm going to test it out this afternoon. <fingers crossed>

[techwriter31]

We were previously using the Server Based Output option. When Flare 11 was released, we wanted to move to the TopNav skin but when I tested the search functionality, it appeared to return ALL topics within the project in the search results. It turned out this was only a problem when using TopNav+Server Based Output search, and not when using the tri-pane HTML5 skin. Tech support confirmed this was a bug. The only workaround was to switch to non server-based HTML5 TopNav.

[jobo]

Zoom looks promising and I've got the basics to work. The next thing I have to figure out is how to connect the topnav search bar to the Zoom search engine. Haven't researched this yet but any hints would be appreciated.