Set-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormatState disabling built-in IFilter issue on Sharepoint SE

Steve Zhang

What I was trying to do was install my own PDF IFilter, disabling Microsoft's.
The company I work for has developed a PDF IFilter that also do OCRs of the images contained in a PDF, while Microsoft's IFilter does not.
This is especially useful when obtaining PDFs from scans.

We want to index these documents on Sharepoint SE so that we can search for them.
All this works with other versions of Sharepoint.

Attempting to set my IFilter with the Set-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormatState command I got the indicated error.

To eliminate any doubt that the error was due to my IFilter, I therefore looked for command execution contexts that had nothing to do with my software.
I then came to reproduce the same error with the same command but trying to disable Microsoft's IFiter XLS, which has nothing to do with mine.

I believe that command always gives that error whether you try to enable an IFilter or disable it

It is very similar to an error reported years ago:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/571b3aa7-9620-4b12-a44f-355d3a1cbfca/powershell-command-to-prevent-the-content-of-pdf-files-being-indexed-fails?forum=sharepointsearch

If this powershell command makes any changes to the configuration file or in the registy I could work around with some manual changes, but I should know exactly where and what to do.