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dr. davidh18089274
Participant
October 30, 2023
Question

Mac Acrobat OCR in the background?

  • October 30, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 1056 views

Every time I have Mac Acrobat do OCR, it disrupts anything I try to work by displaying every page it scans.  Is there a way to have it do OCR in the background so I can use other programs?

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1 reply

gary_sc
Community Expert
gary_scCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 30, 2023

Hi, @dr. davidh18089274, regrettably no. I've been having Acrobat do the OCR process of scanning for maybe 20 years, and it's always been that way. I've complained, I've begged, I've offered beer, all to no avail. 

 

My only suggestion on this is to have all of your scans ready* and then when you leave for lunch or a coffee break, then go for it. 

 

FWIW, Acrobat does a good OCR process. The quality if fine, and can be great if you've done proper scanning in the first place. I'm also on a Mac and the only scanner you have access to (from Acrobat) on the Mac is Apple's Image Capture. The worst scanning software ever. I strongly suggest that you use the software that came with your scanner. For more information on how to get the best quality scan, I suggest you look at the Blog I wronte for Adobe some time back.

 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/scanning-clean-searchable-pdfs/m-p/4785435?page=1#M89

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
October 30, 2023

Adobe designed Acrobat to not be a background application on purpose. They don't want it to be used as a server utility. However, one way I found that works (sometimes) is to minimize it by switching to the Desktop while it's running a batch process (such as an Action). On Windows you can do that using Win+D. The application will continue running in the background, and you could do other things, as long as you don't maximize it.

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 30, 2023

    Cool tip, unfortunately, that's not available for Macs.

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