I want to upload pdf's to my Sailing Club Manager website so they can be searchable

[deeeeps]

Hi All,

I have spent quite a bit of time searching on the Adobe website to find an answer to this simple question(?) question.    

I am constructing a Sailing Club Manager (SCM) website for our sailing association to replace an existing Joomla site which is very difficult to work with..   In this new SCM site I have built a 'knowledge base' or 'tech library' and have populated it with directories full of pdf files of technical articles,  many of which I have downloaded from the old site and many which I have created.

The problem is that neither the old Joomla site or the new SCM site will allow the user to search for words within the pdf files.  

Is there a way I can make these files searchable please?   Even if I have to download them off the site,  do something to them, then re-upload (long job) I would be prepared to do this.  I have not bought an Acrobat subscription yet as I don't want to waste my money if it cannot be done. (I did try an online service and it didn't work, or I was doing something wrong.)

So, in summary,  I want to upload pdf files to a library on my website in a way that the user can search using key words etc.

Please advise

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Are your PDFs created from scanned images? You can tell by zooming in and seeing if the text is pixelated. If so, they are not searchable by default so you need to run OCR on the PDFs. After you find out if they are scanned, reply and I can give you more info on the OCR settings.

If they are not scanned, find out from SCM's (or Joomla's) support and see if they restrict it. Probably not, but you should check anyway. 

If they are not scanned AND the sites do nothing to prevent searching, it's probably a browser issue. Both Chrome and Edge have an Adobe Acrobat browser plugin that give more features than any built-into-the-browser features.