Adobe PDF IFilter for document searches does not work

Question

I am new to full text indexing of documents but I know enough to get the files into the database and apply indexing and searches because I got it to work for Word (.doc) files.  
I'm trying to get Adobe's Ifilter version 11 to work in Windows 7 x64.  I'm using Sql Server 2012 Express with Advanced Services sp1. I have included the full path to the /bin folder for the PDF dll in my PATH environment variable per the instructions.
Register ifilters (after install)
EXEC sys.sp_fulltext_service 'load_os_resources', 1;
Verify that the .pdf filter is installed:
EXEC sys.sp_help_fulltext_system_components 'filter';
This is the row I get for PDF which I delimited with ';'. The underline portion is what I have in PATH env variable.
filter; .pdf; E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603; C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe PDF iFilter 11 for 64-bit platforms\bin\PDFFilter.dll; 11.0.1.36;  Adobe Systems, Inc.
The file content column is
content VARBINARY(MAX) NOT NULL
I insert the file with
INSERT INTO dbo.Documents (filename, doctype, content)
SELECT
 N'MyFile',
 N'pdf',
 bulkcolumn
FROM OPENROWSET(BULK 'C:\MyFile.pdf', SINGLE_BLOB) AS doc;
I reboot the machine and rebuild the Full Text Catalog after installing the PDF iFilter.
Then I search with one of these.  There are Word and PDF files that contain 'apple'.
 SELECT id, filename, doctype FROM dbo.Documents WHERE FREETEXT(content, N'apple');
 SELECT id, filename, doctype FROM dbo.Documents WHERE CONTAINS(content, N'apple');
Now this all works well for .doc files but .PDF files never show up in searches.  I have tried both version 9 and version 11 to no avail.
    

Answer 1

Hello,
We believe we have figured this out.  It looks like it has to do with the length of the default folder location for the Adobe iFilter.
I was able to reproduce the issue and the following resolved it for me.  See if this resolves it for you all as well.
Here is how to get Adobe Version 11 PDF filter to work.
 1 . If you haven’t already, run the following in SQL Server:
Sp_fulltext_service ‘Load_os_resources’, 1
Go
--you might also need to run: 
sp_fulltext_service ‘Verify_signature’,0  --This is used to validate trusted iFilters. 0 disables it. So use with caution.
--go
2. Stop SQL Server.  (Make sure FDHost.exe stops)
3.  
Uninstall the Adobe ifilter (because it defaulted to having spaces or the folder name is too long).
4.  
Reinstall the Adobe iFilter and when it prompts for where to install it, change it to: C:\Program Files\Adobe\PDFiFilter
5.  Once the installation finishes, go the computer’s Environment variables. Add the following to the PATH.
C:\Program Files\Adobe\PDFiFilter\BIN
NOTE: it must include the BIN folder
NOTE: If you had the OLD location that included spaces, remove it from the path environment variable.
6. Start SQL Server
7.  IF you had an existing Full-text index on PDFs, drop the full-text index and recreate it.
8. You should now get results when you run sys.dm_fts_index_keywords('db','tblname')  --Note: Change db to be the actual database name and tblname to be the actual table name.
 Give this a try and see if this fixes yours. 
Sincerely,
Rob Beene, MSFT