What computer hardware configurations can best speed up Adobe Acrobat DC Pro's OCR function-- coverting pdf to recognize text for searchable amd editable pdf? Or is Acrobat not designed to benefit from extra hardware configurations? RAM? Number of proces

[philow60524277]

What computer hardware configurations can best speed up Adobe Acrobat DC Pro's OCR function-- coverting pdf to recognize text for searchable amd editable pdf? Or is Acrobat not designed to benefit from extra hardware configurations?

RAM?

Number of procesing cores?

CPU clock speed?

solid state hard drive?

64 bit processing?

other?

Is the subscription Acrobat DC Pro version any faster at OCR than the 2015 Acrobat DC Pro version?

Thank you.

Philo Willetts

[Test Screen Name · Accepted solution]

Acrobat uses only one processor, so it may benefit from the fastest single core. Or not. And it is a 32-bit app so it won't use more than 3GB maximum (and wouldn't need to, and would not speed up from being 64-bit). And it doesn't use the most important tuning component, which you don't mention, the GPU. So it's fairly easy to analyse. You should use Task Manager to see what limit is actually being reached. It might be maximum CPU, or it might be disk speed. It might be paging a lot if you need more RAM.

But I have to say, if you're looking at optimizing hardware, you probably have a major OCR workload and Acrobat is not the tool for you. It's a light duty desktop tool for low volumes. Look for non-Adobe products optimized for OCR. They may of course not do as good a job of OCR. We cannot discuss the rivals here, but I feel I should mention that they exist.

[philow60524277]

Thank you!

[davel51321289]

this is not a helpful answer

[try67]

Maybe, but it's the correct one, even today...

[dlevy129]

This is pretty pathetic being the acrobat does not invest in R&D for making Acrobat DC faster by using multiple cores and 64 bit architecture.

[Lady Nemo]

I have also been disappointed to see years of inquiries about using the available hardware (RAM, cores) only to see answers for 5+ years (2016 through 2021 and probably more) that Acrobat "Pro" is a single-threaded product and cannot leverage multiple cores that are commonplace on computers today.

For my MacBook Pro 2020 (2.6 GHz, 6 core i7,  16 G RAM), I find that Acrobat "Pro" is too slow at times and yet is using only about 12% of my computer's available hardware.  This is ridiculous for such an expensive product.

I have installed a command-line script on this machine that is written in Python and called OCRmyPDF.  It uses the Tessaract OCR engine.  When it is running, it is very obvious since the fans spin up and the processor meters show full usage.  It is also much faster.  Getting all of the dependencies installed was a little bit of a chore but now I have something that I can use when I don't care to wait as long.

Another failing of Acrobat "Pro" is when you try to combine more than a certain number (or combined file size) into a PDF.  It fails with a cryptic message about a table being full.  I am not sure why this should be so on a 16 GB RAM machine except that it was programmed with conservative values for the computers of 5-10 years ago and never modified to look at the available resources.  Also, why it does not discover that it will run out of space (say check the size when doing the permission scan of the files) is beyond me as a long time programmer and system administrator.

I think that the Acrobat team is on vacation or is busy making features that no one has really asked for.  It feels like a largely neglected product when the most common use cases for building and performing OCR are better handled by FREE open-source programs.

[defaultv5mw06u40h7a]

As an attorney, I use Acrobat every day. What happened here? This used to be the "Acrobat Pro" of PDF software! I've been waiting all afternoon for acrobat to redact several pages in a w00 page document. This is the only reason I pay for creative cloud suite. I've about had it with this BS

[dlevy129]

I work in IT at a small law firm. its pretty depressing to basicly tell a user it is what it is when it comes to Adobe products. I wish there was something more robust, faster and less buggy. Adobe doesnt even look through these threads so whatever I guess.