Hi there —
Unfortunately there isn’t a very “nice” way to implement this for a user that isn’t advanced.
Is there a specific reason you need the content to be in .pdf form? If it all remained in posts the content would not only be more easily searchable on your website, but greater search engines like Google & Bing as well. This is essential to the success of any website.
Otherwise, I’d suggest uploading the .pdf files as you would an image (use the upload tool at the top of the post edit page) but it’s going to be near impossible for you to make this content searchable.
Cheers,
Lara
You can make the content searchable by manually adding a link in a page or post for each pdf file uploaded…
Seacoast — would this actually make the entire text of the .pdf searchable, though?
i would at least need a nice template to have organized the files neatly
anyone???
WordPresssos — see my comment above.
Also, this plugin might help you in making your .pdsfs searchable after you upload them.
It sounds like you might want to work with a professional who would take care of this for you.
yup, i saw your post
it’s just that if making the pdf content searchable is hard, i am just asking for a nice looking template, without search features
Ahhh I see 🙂
I’d suggest using the great default template for WordPress. It’s very customizable, and you might not have trouble installing this plugin yourself to see if it helps with search: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything/
Seacoast — would this actually make the entire text of the .pdf searchable, though?
Was that asked? No, but why would one want to have search hit a bunch of text in a pdf?? Review how to do a proper href for search…
Seacoast — I don’t know why anyone would have content on a website that wasn’t searchable per the latest in best practices for content marketing. I’m not sure what you mean by “href for search” either…
One would want to have a bunch of text in a PDF searchable if one was working on a site that contains hundreds of medical journals in PDF form. That is how they are distributed, and it would be ridiculous, and also not economically feasible, to pull all of the content out of all of them.
Why is there no WP solution to searching PDFs? Other search engines are able to do so.
It’s extremely frustrating. The site is built, and now I find out that all of their past issues can’t be searched?
This may or may not be helpful, but I’ve partly achieved what the OP wanted by a combination of things at http://klezmonauts.co.uk, which is a library of musical scores in pdf form. The theme is Choices (which has an excellent portfolio built-in) and the plugin is Google Doc Embedder by Ken Davies. A little code tweaking was necessary to remove thumbnail images and excerpts from the portfolio items, since the titles were all that was required – as would be the case for a library of medical journals too, I expect.
Of course the PDFs in a music library wouldn’t be searchable even if they were searchable, if you see what I mean, so the approach here (which would work for the OP too) is to make liberal use of categories and tags, which can quickly narrow down the library visitor’s field of vision until they have a manageable number of documents in the specific area they want, which they can then easily and elegantly preview.
