Recently, I encountered an issue with SharePoint 2013 search crawls where .pdf files smaller than 1 MB reported a warning: “The item has been truncated in the index because it exceeds the maximum size”. The default MaxDownLoadSize for documents in SharePoint is 64MB, which was more than enough the handle these relatively small .pdf files.

After I reached out to some co-workers; one suggested that the error might be a false-positive and the entire document had been crawled. I tested this by first searching for words at the end of the document and no matches were found; this would be expected if it were truncated. Next, I tried searching for text in the middle of the document, no matches were found either. I thought it must have truncated a lot of text and tried searching for text contained at the very beginning of the document. No results were found! So when the warning said it truncated the item, it had truncated the whole document. Read More…