Can Acrobat 11 be made to do OCR using multiple CPU cores?

OCR processing takes time. Using multiple CPU cores would speed up processing. Acrobat 10 was not a multithreaded application. How about Acrobat 11? Does 11 by default do OCR using multiple CPU cores (if available)? If not, are there any workarounds, e.g. scripting, to help make Acrobat 11 do OCR using multiple CPU cores? Either through Acrobat's built in scripting language or using external scripts that launch and direct multiple single thread instances of Acrobat to in parallell to parts of the processing job.

Note: This question is not too localized (not limited to a specific moment in time) because (1) Adobe does not release new major Acrobat versions very often (Acrobat 10 was released two years ago) and (2) Adobe Acrobat is a widely used application.


I have installed the Acrobat 11 (XI) trial in VirtualBox. Acrobat 11 is single threaded.

I have also made an external script that starts multiple Acrobat instances (one per CPU core), parallel processes the OCR job and merges the result. A crucial step is to turn on error logging in Acrobat preferences, parse all .log and reprocess any error files. The script (when using 4 cores) still does OCR over two times faster than Acrobat 11 default.


Multithreading needs to built into an application. The developer has to write code that creates threads and that breaks down the task into subtasks that can be allocated to each thread. If the developers of Acrobat fail to do this for their OCR recognition code, there's no way for the user to create the extra logic needed.