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Participant
November 2, 2022
Question

How To Know If An All-In-One Printer Will Work With MacOS Acrobat Pro?

  • November 2, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 283 views

I am considering buying the following Canon All-In-One Printer/Scanner/Fax products: TS9520, TS9521C, G7020, MAXIFY GX7021. I have Acrobat Pro installed on MacOS Ventura 13.0. The Acrobat function "Create PDF From Scanner" with OCR and content correction functions is important to me. How is it possible to determine before purchasing which (if any) of the products listed above will work with Acrobat Pro "Create PDF From Scanner"? Purchasing and returning half a dozen All-In-One products to find one that works due to missing or poor product documentation (both Adobe's and Canon's) is unacceptable!

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2 replies

gary_sc
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 2, 2022

Anything you get will be fine with a Mac.

 

The one thing you need to be aware of is that when scanning through Acrobat Pro on a Mac, you will be using Apple's Image Capture software to do the actual scan. It is dreadful quality scanning software on both the issue of very limited dynamic range and extremely limited image adjustment capabilities.

 

What I STRONGLY recommend is for you to use your scanner's software. Do not try to scan from within Acrobat; it's just not worth it. What I do, and have been doing for over 25 years now with no issues, is scan and save the TIF format images to a folder on your desktop. Then, once complete, drag the image(s) to the Acrobat icon in your Dock. You will be asked if you want to combine these into a single document; click "yes." If you scanned to a TIF document, then Acrobat will also do the OCR conversion (if you scan to JPG or PNG, you will have to do that as a separate step after the PDF is created).

 

Two points to mention: 

1) Note that the size of a TIF document can be very large; 20 MB is common. But when that same document is converted to a text-only PDF, it will be about 80-150 kb, a standard-sized PDF (If there are images in the document, it will be larger.

2) Because of the way documents are processed by the finder, a " (#)" will be added at the end of each scan unless you update a number system by yourself for each scan which can be tedious. So, the first scan will create "mydocument.tiff," the next one will be "mydocument (1).tiff," the next "mydocument (2).tiff." What will happen because of this is that the first page of your scanning will be the last page of the PDF. There are two things you can do about this: AFTER all the scanning is complete, add " (0)" at the end of the actual first page (note there's a space before the "(0)." Alternatively, once the processing is done in Acrobat, just go into the "Organize Pages" tool and simply drag the last page to the first position. Save this, and you're done. 

 

One last thing: scanners have dumbed down a lot over the years, and software has as well. In the past, all scanning software provided the tools necessary to get a good-quality scan of anything from a paper document to an image. Now, not so much. You'll probably find a button that asks if you are scanning an image or a document. That's probably the best you can do, but do use it. It will recognize the "white point" of the page and set the controls, so you do not have a gray page with text from the other side bleeding to the front. I wrote the following for Adobe many years ago when individual controls were the norm, but there may be some other useful points to consider when scanning. I hope it helps you.

 

Good luck

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 2, 2022

There's no reason it won't, assuming it's compatible with the OS in general.