MacOS 12 Monterrey Ideal Memory for Acrobat Pro on Mac Pro Intel or MacBook Pro M1 Pro chips

Question

I'm considering Apple hardware upgrades for the very fastest performance of Adobe Acrobat Pro for MacOS.

My primary use case is need is to achieve Adobe Acrobat Pro OCR that is as fast as possible, fast merging of multiple PDFs and very fast searching of PDF for legal work. Hardware cost is *not* the primary concern. Also, portability of a laptop is *not* a primary concern. I'm also not interested in waiting for the 2022 Mac Pro with M1 / M2 architecture because I expect the cost to be higher and that Mac Pro 2019 is a good value. My theory is more RAM is better. What hard data is there about Acrobat Pro architecture on Mac OS 12 Monterrey? There was a time that I had PDF files so large that Acrobat Pro could not search them.

I am considering either:

1. 2019 Mac Pro 3.5 gigahertz 8-core Intel processor machine with 256 Gigabytes of RAM (or more since the Mac Pro allows up to I believe a terabyte), 2 Terabytes SSD drive or

2. MacBook Pro 16 inch with M1 Pro processor and maximum allowed 64 gigabytes of RAM, 2 Terabytes SSD drive.

Trying to figure out if the newest M1 Pro processor and 64 gigabytes or a very fast Intel chip with even more RAM (4 x more) would be faster for my use case. I want enough RAM so that Acrobat PDF files do not create OS swap space to disk; yes the SSD performance should help. What I read is that for many operations the M1 Pro is similar in performance to Mac Pro Intel chips.

So, I lean toward the machine that allows the most RAM, i.e, the 2019 Mac Pro. Will that help?

gary_sc · Answer

There is a maxim in scanning (in general) that you can go faster but your quality goes down. But there are ways around this to achieve the best of both.

Many years ago I had the task of scanning a large number of documents and to OCR them. I was using my flatbed scanner and was doing about 100-150 documents a day. It was taking forever.

There are two problems with Acrobat performing OCR: It is not fast and it takes over your computer. After each page of recognition, Acrobat will jump in front of whatever you are doing and say something to the effect "page 34 is done," and then continue to work away. I was unable to read email, or anything else during this process.

A friend of mine offered to loan me his FujiScan bulk feeder scanner, it saved me as it could scan both sides of a document and OCR them. HOWEVER, the quality of the OCR was dreadful AND the size of the documents were ginormous. I tried running one of the documents through Acrobat for OCRing the document and it cut the size down several hundreds of a percent and the OCR was very good.

So, my process was to scan all morning. Then, during lunch, run the documents through Acrobat. Scan all afternoon, then run OCR on them via Acrobat when I went home. When I came back the next day I'd repeat.

This process worked well. There is tidying up to do afterwords because it will give a name to the document that has nothing to do with the content so each document will have to be renamed, but overall, this process was the fastest I found. And, a bit of suggestion: you will get better quality OCR if you scan at 600 ppi than 300 ppi but the scan will take a bit longer. Again, speed versus quality, you can't completely get around that.

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