SearchWP Xpdf Integration

SearchWP offers the unique feature of extracting plain text from PDF files uploaded to your WordPress website. Out of the box, SearchWP attempts to do this using only PHP, but due to the complexity and variation of the PDF format that sometimes results in content not being accurately extracted.

Using the Xpdf Integration Extension you can offload all the work PHP has to do in processing your PDF files to Xpdf’s command line tools, which are extremely fast and accurate when extracting content from your PDFs. After activating the Extension, you will need to follow the installation instructions. Once installed, SearchWP will offload the PDF content extraction process to Xpdf.

Once you have downloaded the command line tools for your server type:

1. Extract xpdf-tools-linux-4.03.tar.gz (the version number may be different)
2. Upload the pdftotext binary (found in either the bin32 or bin64 directory after extracting, depending on your server architecture) to a non-public location, outside your Web root
3. Upload the pdfinfo binary (found in either the bin32 or bin64 directory after extracting, depending on your server architecture) to a non-public location, outside your Web root
4. Ensure that both pdftotext and pdfinfo have execute permissions for the PHP user on your server

The last step is to tell SearchWP Xpdf Integration where you installed pdftotext and pdfinfo. To do this:

Add the following to your SearchWP Customizations plugin, replacing /path/to/pdftotext with the actual path to the pdftotext and pdfinfo binaries (not the folder) on your server.