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  1. It would be great if Acrobat was multi=threaded. I routinely have to OCR 4000 page documents which almost always fail and take hours

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    Under review  ·  18 comments  ·  Acrobat for Windows and Mac » Scanning and OCR  ·  Admin →
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    James D. Keeline commented  · 

    4,000 pages is a lot. There is merit in doing it in pieces and combining them afterward.

    When I don't care to wait for Adobe Acrobat Amateur (it does not deserve the "Pro" label) to OCR a document, I use a Python script on my MacBook Pro 2020 16", 32G RAM, 2T SSD called OCRmyPDF. As I recall from the installation, there were a few dependencies but ultimately I got it going with "brew." Now I can OCR from the command line (terminal). When it is running, the fans and processor meters show that all of the resources are being employed. The time required depends on the resources but is about 1/3 that of Acrobat with an 8-core processor.

    It is a tad ironic that a free, open source program can out-perform the expensive Adobe product which has not improved in this area in the past 10-20 years.

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    James D. Keeline commented  · 

    I have seen this sentiment raised for about a decade. Considering the millions of dollars (or equivalent currency) that people pay for Adobe Acrobat Pro, it is well past the point when it should behave like a fully professional program. This means rock-solid stability and reliability and speed. If we invest in hardware with ample RAM, multi-core processors, and good CPU speed, the software should take advantage of the available resources. Doing otherwise is cheating us from the productivity we deserve.

    When I use software like HandBrake, it is immediately obvious because the fans spin up and any metering software will show that the resources are being fully utilized. It is harder to do video in a multicore multithreaded environment but they manage. Why can't Adobe in the processes we use every time we open Acrobat Pro ? This includes OCR ("Text Recognition") and building PDFs from images.

    This should be faster than it is with a brand new MacBook Pro 2020 with 16G RAM and 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7. For the OCR process, it is not really different than my old computer, a mid-2014 MacBook Pro with only 8G RAM.