Please not that the pdftotext plugin is an independent plugin, the funtionality of the plugin may depend on the hosting server's configurations. Here we present the procedure that will work for most linux hosting services.
Downloading the pdftotext plugin
- You will need to download the compiled binary for linux from the Foolabs Xpdf download page, in our case the file was xpdfbin-linux-3.03.tar.gz
- Extract the gz compressed file
- Extract the tar package
- The pdftotext plugin is found in the bin32 and bin64 folders (which will be required depends on the server)
Uploading the pdftotext plugin
- create a folder on the server's site (eg pdfolder)
- ftp the file from bin64 to that folder
Configuring Advanced Site Search
- Log into the site's Joomla Admin panel
- go to extensions - Advanced Site Search
- Select the Options Icon at the top right (Settings in Joomla 1.5)
- Set Automatically Enable Indexed PDF Files to YES
- Set pdftotext Binary with the filename of the plugin, in this case pdftotext
- Set pdftotext Path to the full server path to the plugin something like /home/myaccount/public_html/mysite/pdfolder/
Now the cron will search for and list the pdf assets from your site, and you will see the text that will be used for the indexing of the pdf in each asset.
Running the Fake Cron job manually
You may want to force the cron to run, you will find the Fake Cron url in Basic Tab of the Advanced Search Options.
- Open the link to your fake cron in your browser /index.php?option=com_searchadvanced&task=cron
- The cron job will run if it has not run recently
- If the cron job has run recently you may need to delete the .lastrun.php file found at /administrator/components/com_searchadvanced/ and then go to the fake cron URL