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Our current content is stored within courses, we have a few quick reference guides so users can find documentation quicker. We have implemented drop-down header links for our most popular content, we have activated SEO search and have populated keywords, and we have added for each course a “topic” menu option. My question is can the “Search for Content” option return results for individual PDF pages within course materials instead of showing you the list of courses the PDF page instructions might be available in and having to then search within the course to find the PDF page?

@sfurtek This is a challenge on the web and not a Ti thing.  Even a Google search generally cannot bring results back from within a PDF for these reasons:

  • Most PDFs are in an image format rather than text format
  • Most PDFs do not load as quickly as a web page and therefore searches stop at their meta data and then timeout and move on
  • Most PDF are not capable of being rich in meta data vs a webpage
  • Searches require text extraction and PDF are not suited nor designed for this purpose
  • PDF are not indexed like a standard HTML page.  See above.

Since PDFs are not mobile friendly either, you could extract all of the text and put on a text page, then making the PDF a supplement in resources or an additional page.

@charles.zimmerman - Thank you for the explanation. This helps with why our quick reference guides are easily found by searchable keywords (text description) with downloadable links verses the content stored within courses. We have started designing our content with more text and use the PDF guides as a supplement page which our users can download for reference materials. 

Thank you for the quick response...

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