Using Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional version 8.1.0 with MacOS High Sierra version 10.13.6 ?

[bobmayo]

I still have Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional  version 8.1.0   that was  bundled with my ScanSnap S1500M.

I use  the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M  with my MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) which is running MacOS High Sierra version 10.13.6 .

Based on advice from ScanSnap support pages, I have also installed ScanSnap Manager 6.3.70 .

Here are my Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional  questions.

Is there any inherent problems I would face using Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional  with MacOS High Sierra version 10.13.6 and/or ScanSnap Manager 6.3.70 ?

I know that, over the years, as the MacOS and other  software progressed to later versions, some incompatibilities or conflicts developed for previous versions.

With the combination I currently have— as described above—

Would I risk any problems with using Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional  and ScanSnap Manager 6.3.70 to use my ScanSnap S1500M in creating searchable PDFs and/or non-searchable PDFs?

Also, would there be any problems the reliability of the PDFs they would create?

Thanks for your help.

[gary_sc]

Hi Bob,

First, your last question is easy: if you create a PDF, it's fine. There are no issues.

Your first question is even easier: you cannot use your scanner's software from WITHIN Acrobat. The Mac OS does not allow that. To make matters even uglier, you'll be limited to using Apple's "Image Capture" which is DREADFUL scanning software. My advice to you in this regard is to scan using the software that came with your scanner, save the files in a folder on your desktop and then process these files with Acrobat after the scanning is done. This is what I do and it never fails. (I also recommend that you scan your files as TIFF images and high resolution.

Now comes the probably bad news: Acrobat 8 has been declared old by Adobe and may not work. It's simple to test this, start it up and see if it runs. If it does, do what you can but if parts of it do not work, do not bother to ask what you can do because the answer will be to get an up-to-date version. I'm sorry but software is like that: if you update one thing you have to update the other thing. I say "probably" because I do not know what will happen but my guess is that it will not work.

And.... if it does work with HS, it will definitely not work with Mojave. It's just too old.

Very sorry for the bad news.

[bobmayo]

Gary, I appreciate your helpful response, but your marking your own answer as the "Correct" answer deprives me of the opportunity to benefit from the answers of others, who may skip looking at my question as a result.  Is it possible for you to remove your self-designating "Correct" marking for now?

Is there anyone out there who can remember back and cite any specific issues you personally experienced or heard about when using Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional with either macOS High Sierra, or with any version of Mac OS X that came out after Acrobat 8 Pro?  As gary_sc suggested, I can try trial-and-error, but one of the nice things about a user forum is being able to learn from the first-hand experiences of other users.

On Gary's reply, "if you create a PDF, it's fine. There are no issues,":

Actually, in the case of apps working with ScanSnap Manager, there have been instances of PDF's created by apps developing problems.  They include file sizes changing after their creation when opened later, and orders of pages changing.  So, the ability to create a PDF doesn't preclude there being issues with the PDFs.  That's why I was asking if anyone had first hand experiences with Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro they could share.

On Gary's observation, "you cannot use your scanner's software from WITHIN Acrobat":

You can, however, use Acrobat *from within ScanSnap Manager*, which has the ability to call up and interact with Adobe Acrobat and other applications. Creating profiles to do so is one of the basic features of ScanSnap Manager.

Gary, thanks for your suggestion to process the files with Acrobat after the scanning is done. That would make for fewer variables to interact.

[gary_sc]

Hi Bob,

Sure. To be honest, I'm not sure I did label it as correct, I might have. But I have removed the label and if you chose to reliable it as such, that's fine or if you chose not to, that's also fine.

As far as Acro-8 and HS, I'd actually be very curious as to how many of you there are. I'd assume it's a very small number. If nothing else, I'm amazed that it still is working. Keep in mind though that even when an application is working, the chances that ALL of the application works is very spotty. A lot has happened since you got that MacBook Pro. I just looked and it appears that you probably had 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on that when you got that computer. A LOT has changed since then.

The issues you described with your PDFs sound more like issues that might have come up because of the age of your PDF's creator rather than anything else. While I do not think this is the cause of your file size changes (see below for that issue), but page order changes may be related. I've never heard of that issue before.

FWIW, I did use ScanSnap about 3 years ago, I had thousands of documents to scan and a friend lent me his FujiScan (Sorry I cannot remember which model, I gave it back once I was finished.)

I did not look to see if there was any access to Acrobat from within ScanSnap, that's not something that I'd have expected to see so didn't bother to even look. What I did discover was that the size of documents processed from ScanSnap were very large and the quality of the OCR was rather poor. What I ended up doing was to scan documents all day and place them into a folder. Then when leaving work I'd tell Acrobat to OCR every document in that same folder and the next morning I'd do any final cleanup that was necessary.

[Note: I did this as I was leaving because Acrobat has one REALLY annoying habit of letting you know every time a page has been processed. This means you cannot surf the web, look at email, write the great American novel or anything because Acrobat will pop up EVERY time a page has been processed.]

Anyhow, the result of this extra Acrobat step was that the quality of the OCR went up considerably AND the size of each document went down considerably. I do wonder if this is related to your document file size issue??

Since you're using FujiScan, it's almost impossible to fine-tune each scan at time of scan, but if you even need very clean quality scans, you may wish to check out this blog item I wrote for Adobe.

Good luck with what you're doing, you are on the edge! ;>)

https://forums.adobe.com/community/creativepipeline/blog/2018/01/22/scanning-clean-search-able-pdfs