Documentation

WebEquipe PDF Search indexes your PDF files and makes their text searchable. When visitors search your site, they see results from both your posts/pages and the content inside your PDFs.

Supported PDFs

• Works with: Standard, text-based PDFs (the kind you create or export from Word, Google Docs, etc.). File size default 50MB, configurable up to 500MB in settings.
• Does not work with: Scanned PDFs or image-only PDFs (no extractable text)—use OCR elsewhere first. Password-protected PDFs cannot be indexed.

Keep Private PDFs Out of Search

Need to hide or protect certain PDFs? Use Exclude so a PDF is never indexed and never appears in search—even when you run “Re-index All PDFs” or bulk index. Excluded PDFs stay in your Media Library; they just won’t be searchable. Use Include later to allow indexing again. You can exclude or include PDFs from the Media Library or from Settings → PDF Search (Manage PDFs).

How to Use

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Go to Settings → PDF Search.
3. Click Re-index All PDFs to index existing PDFs (new uploads are indexed automatically by default).
4. Use your site’s search or add the shortcode 
   Search
    on a page—PDFs will appear in results.

Existing PDFs need to be indexed once; after that, new uploads can be indexed automatically (optional in settings). To hide specific PDFs from search, use Exclude on them (Media Library or Settings → PDF Search → Manage PDFs).

Settings at a Glance

All options are under Settings → PDF Search:

• General – Turn indexing on/off, include PDFs in WordPress search, maximum file size (50MB default), excerpt length.
• Indexing options – Batch size for re-indexing.
• Search display options – Show or hide PDF icon, file size, page count, last updated date, and thumbnail preview in search results.
• Advanced – Debug logging, memory/timeout for large PDFs, background processing, delete data on uninstall.

Full details and shortcode options: Settings → PDF Search Help.

What You Can Do

• Full-text search – Search inside PDF content, not just filenames.
• Control each PDF – Index, unindex, or exclude from the Media Library or the PDF list on the settings page.
• Bulk actions – Index, unindex, include, or exclude multiple PDFs at once.
• Search display – Show PDF icon, file size, page count, and excerpts (configurable in settings).
• Shortcode – Add a PDF search form with 
  Search
   (see Settings → PDF Search Help for options).
• Background processing – Large PDFs are processed in the background to avoid timeouts.

Troubleshooting

PDFs not appearing in search

Ensure PDFs are indexed (Media Library → “Search Indexed” column), “Enable Search Integration” is on in Settings → PDF Search, and the PDF is not excluded. See the FAQ for more.

Indexing fails or times out

Use Settings → PDF Search → Advanced: enable “Background Processing” for large PDFs. Ensure your server PHP memory_limit and max_execution_time are sufficient for very large files (see Help for details). Reduce “Batch Size” if re-indexing many PDFs at once.

Other issues

See the FAQ above and Settings → PDF Search Help for full documentation.

Privacy

The plugin stores extracted PDF text and metadata in a custom database table and a compressed backup in WordPress post meta for PDF attachments. If debug logging is enabled, it stores recent log entries in a WordPress option. It does not collect or send visitor data. If your PDFs contain personal or sensitive information, that content is in the index; mention this in your privacy policy if required.

Third-Party Libraries

• smalot/pdfparser (LGPL-3.0) – PDF text extraction
• symfony/polyfill-mbstring (MIT) – multibyte string support