July 2014 CU for SharePoint 2013 released–with a search feature long lost from 2010

You may now install custom PDF iFilters again, like the one from Foxit or Adobe! In SharePoint 2010 you could install any iFilter you wanted for text extraction and the most common to install was for PDF documents. With SharePoint 2013 this was replaced by an internal file handler instead, which could not be overridden.

With the July 2014 CU for SharePoint 2013, you can yet again install your custom PDF iFilter, or override any built-in handler to use the iFilter of your choice.
If you previously ran the command Get-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormat -SearchApplication $ssa -Identity pdf. You would see the following output.

Identity   : pdf
Name       : PDF
MimeType   : application/pdf
Extension  : .pdf
BuiltIn    : True
Enabled    : True

After applying the July 2014 CU you get this instead

Identity   : pdf
Name       : PDF
MimeType   : application/pdf
Extension  : .pdf
BuiltIn    : True
Enabled    : True
UseIFilter : False

Notice the last line which says UseIFilter. In order to turn on iFilter support for PDF processing, use the commandlet  Set-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormatState which has an added switch –UseIFilter for this purpose.

The full command to switch to iFilter for PDF is listed below, and you can use a similar command for any iFilter you want to replace – but remember to install the iFilter properly first.

Set-SPEnterpriseSearchFileFormatState -SearchApplication $ssa -Identity pdf -UseIFilter $true -Enable $true

References:

SharePoint Server 2013 July 2014 CU Download
SharePoint Foundation 2013 July 2014 CU Download
Implement a custom iFilter in SharePoint 2013


Thanks to Neil Hodgkinson for informing me of this file format change :)