What will FLPro do if there is more than one plug-in present and enabled for a particular extension?

Question

For example, if I install a plug-in that can search for text in image-based PDFs that have not already been through OCR, does the PDFConverter plug-in that comes with FLPro have to be removed? Can and will FLPro use both plug-ins to search PDF files?

Answer 1

Only one plug-in will be used during a file conversion. If two plug-ins are registered then the type of plug-in is used for precedence. The order is:

1. Primary IFilters - where IFilters have been listed as Primary
2. Data interpreters - interpreters that read a file line-by-line
3. Data converter interpreters - interpreters that convert a whole file to text in a single operation
4. Secondary IFilters - where IFilters are listed as Secondary

If both plug-ins are of the same type then one of the plug-ins will be picked, usually the one with the lower alphanumeric sort in the file name, although this is not always consistent. Therefore it is not recommended to have two plug-ins registered for the same file extension at the same time.