HI Alex,
I've been scanning on Macs for OCR purposes for over 30 years now. Some time back, Apple chose to no longer rely upon TWAIN, a linkage software used to connect two different applications. So, if you have an HP scanner and want to scan from Acrobat, TWAIN would allow that to happen. It still can be done on PCs, but their approach is to provide convenience over any chance of virus attack. Jobs felt differently, and now there is no Flash.
What Apple does provide is the application "Image Capture." It's a multi-tool application that lets you ingest images from your camera to scanning. For the former, it is not all that much different than simply dragging the images from a camera card to your computer. For the latter, it also is very bare bones. The dynamic range that IC is able to capture is maybe 6-bit, much less than a JPG image can support (8-bit). And trying to enhance an image or a document is a fool's errand.
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 20 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!
http://photosbycoyne.com/Gary's_Help/Scanning/clean-scanning.html
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