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Working with PDFs in SharePoint

By Michael Doyle posted 10-15-2010 00:41

  

It is a simple fact that there are a lot of PDF’s out there and odds are you are going to have them in your SharePoint environment. You can’t make them as friendly to work with as Office documents but you can go a long way to make them feel more like an integrated part of your environment. There are some simple things you can do to greatly improve the end user experience. So, let’s start with some basics.

Add the Icon.
By default, SharePoint puts in some generic looking icon for the PDF. To add the image for the document do the following steps.

  1. Place the image (.ico or .gif) in the <SharePoint Hive>\Template\Images directory.
  2. Edit docicon.xml which is found in the <SharePoint Hive>\Template\XML directory.
  3. Find the <ByExtension> section add the following line
        <Mapping Key="pdf" Value="NameofIconFile"/>
  4. Do a IISRESET for this to take effect.

Opening Adobe PDF’s in SharePoint 2010

The default behavior of PDFs in SharePoint 2010 is when you click on the document you have to save it to your hard drive before you can view it. Not necessarily the behavior you expect of documents. What you want is for the document to open up like Office documents. You will need to do this on a per web application level. To make this happen do the following steps.

  1. Open up Central Administration.
  2. Go to Manage Web Applications.
  3. Click on the web application you want to change.
  4. Click on General Settings.
  5. Scroll down to Browser File Handling
  6. Change the setting from Strict to Permissive
  7. Click Ok and you are done.

There are some risks associated with these changes but if you are using an Intranet and doing virus scanning then you should be okay.

Indexing the contents

By default, SharePoint does not index the contents of PDFs. You will have to install the iFilter which comes with the latest versions of the reader or you can download it from here http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=2611

You will have to start a full crawl of the content in order to index the content.

Well, that should get you started. There are some more advanced things you can do with PDFs but that is for another post.



#Adobe #SharePoint #sharepoint #PDF
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