Indexing PDF files only?

[GreenOrganics]

Hello,

I've searched through the forums and haven't been able to locate information on exactly what I'm trying to do, so...

I have a site with over 100 PDF files, and I'd like to be able to use Zoom to index only the PDF files, making them a database of sorts if you will. I'm running Zoom Professional Edition, Version 7.1 (Build 1022). My site is on a server running ASP. I've tried several different indexing configurations, and can't get just the PDFs to index.

Is what I want to do even possible? Thank you in advance.

[David]

Yes it is. Offline mode might be the best for this.
Otherwise you might need a HTML page that provides links to all the PDF files.

[GreenOrganics]

Thank you for the quick response, David. We have a page with a list of the PDF file links, and we're hoping to index only that page, and using meta tags embedded into the PDFs, wind up with a "smart" search of the PDFs if that makes sense. So once the HTML page with the PDF links is finalized, I would just need to index that page only, is that correct? Thank you again for your assistance!

[Richard]

Also make sure you have ".pdf" specified as a scan extensions.

As David mentioned, Offline Mode is the recommended method if you are only indexing PDF files, assuming there are copies of the PDF files available locally. When using Spider Mode, each PDF file will have to be downloaded before being indexed.

[rkg82]

Note also that you can use Zoom "custom description" (.desc) files to locally index the .desc files as proxies for distant files that you cannot download for security or bandwidth reasons, or don't want to download because it would take too long. We use .desc files for video recordings that range to 200-750 MB in size, and very big PDFs (80 MB +), for example. If your distant PDF files use a standard file naming convention, you could even make .desc file creation automatic, or semi-automatic, via a third party scripting language, macro tool, or a regular-expression tool.