It was like pulling teeth trying to get a solution for this until I contacted my old bud Mike Gannotti, now down in Microsoft's North Carolina offices. He supplied the key to the solution after checking on an internal discussion list.
Of all the things I tried, I believe these steps did the trick:
- Install the Adobe iFilter for PDF's on the WSS front end machine. I didn't install this on the SQL Server where the content database or configuration database live.
- In RegEdit, check to see if HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\pdf is present and has a GUID for a default value (mine was {4C904448-74A9-11D0-AF6E-00C04FD8DC02})
- Check to see if HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\Filters\.pdf is present and has:
Default = (value not set)
Extension = pdf
FileTypeBucket REG_DWORD = 0x00000001 (1)
MimeTypes = application/pdf
- Open the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\some GUID here\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList. This is the part that Mike clued me in on that I've never seen documented anywhere.
- There should be values 0-37 (plus default). Given that, Add a new REG_SZ value and name it 38.
- Set this new string value to pdf.
- Exit RegEdit.
- stop and start the Sharepoint Search Service. (net stop spsearch, net start spsearch).
I did this and added some PDF documents, then checked after some phone calls and found that search was now finding them. Yay! I don't know if this applies to MOSS 2007, but WSS 3.0 is what I needed.