Cannot use scan feature of printers

Hi Austin,

Scanning from within Acrobat is a kind of a pain because Acrobat has no scanning capabilities whatsoever. What it does do is rely upon other scanning software and sort of leaches onto that. Windows has this a bit better (in a limited fashion) as it can use TWAIN to link up to other applications, in their case, the scanner's software. Mac stopped using TWAIN many years ago because it can be a conduit for computer viruses. 

What Acrobat does on the Mac is to use Apple's "Image Capture" software, which is the worst scanning software I've ever dealt with (and I've been scanning on the Mac since the late 80s).

What you are best served with is to use the scanning software that came with your scanner/printers, and save as a TIF file on your desktop. Then after scanning is complete, drag the file onto the Acrobat icon in the Dock. If all of the files are part of the same document, you will want to click "Yes" when Acrobat asks you to combine the files into one document. Otherwise, click "No."

There are two reasons for scanning to the TIF format: (1) the most important one is that if you do what I mentioned above, Acrobat will open, convert to PDF, AND automatically OCR the document. If you had saved it as JPG, you'd have to do the OCR in an extra step. (2) TIF files are not automatically damaging to files as JPG files (google: "jpg lossy image").

One small extra, a full-page TIF document will be about 8 MB. Once converted to PDF and OCR, it will be between 80-150 kb. So do not be thrown off by the size of the initial documents. Once converted you can toss the TIF files.