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date 12.Jun.2022

■ Sumatra PDF IFilter wrapper


There is a wealth of PDF programs available, but not all of them work well in terms of shell integration. My personal favorite of late is Sumatra PDF, a lightweight, robust and open source reader, which works perfectly with xplorer² (searching for text and previewing PDFs). If you have some other PDF tool installed which happens to misbehave with xplorer² (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader), here is a little plugin that will restore text search for xplorer².
Click to download PDF text filter (9 MB) — based on Sumatra PDF v3.4.5

Minimum requirements: windows Vista or later

This plugin is basically a wrapper for Sumatra PDF text extraction DLL, which you can install without harming your default PDF program. You keep on using your favorite PDF tool while enabling text search too — kind of have your cake and eat it situation.

The good thing with Sumatra PDF is that you can install it as a secondary PDF reader. When you install Sumatra PDF it won't force itself as the default PDF program (if it detects you are using something else), but it allows you to override system integration functions, like desktop search and explorer preview (including xplorer² native preview tab). So you can install it just for the benefit of preview and text search, ticking the options as necessary:

sumatra installer options

If you want minimum hassle, just download the aforementioned plugin (it is equivalent to the highlighted installer option above). If you want more tweaks, including the latest filter version, then install Sumatra PDF proper (it is just a 7MB download!)

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