Finereader Pro performance and benchmarks

[jerwin]

Does anybody have any tips for speeding up finereader pro? This is a major part of my workflow, and processing of documents seems to slow down to a crawl at the preprocessing stage.

I'm using it on a 3.5 GHz i5 5k imac... 24 GB RAM, fusion drive.
Would using a RAM disk help?

 

[Mac-lover3]

There isn't such a thing as a RAM disk.
There is such a thing called SSD disks/drives which are faster than traditional HDD's. But you have a fusion drive where already a part is SSD. Do you notice any slow downs elsewhere?

 

[Significant1]

My experience is more cores is better. I have an 2009 iMac with quadcore 2.8GHz i7 and a Macbook Air 11" dualcore 1,7GHz i7. Geekbench Single core performance of my Macbook Air is approx 50% better than my iMac, but as long as the document has enough pages to feed all cores in parallel on my iMac, it is faster.

 

[jerwin]

Viewing Activity Monitor, it appears that Finereader spawns three FineExec processes of three to four threads each. Each is given approximately 500 Megabytes to work with. The major cpu hog is the image preprocessing stage, which apparently my photographs require.

(also, it's possible to create a ram disk on macosx. e.g. https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/how-to-create-a-4gbs-ram-disk-in-mac-os-x/)

 

[ZapNZs]

I've never gotten what I consider to be outstanding performance with any OCR/ICR software that does most or all of its processing on the computer (as opposed to some scanners that perform at least a portion of the preprocessing/processing on its own dedicated hardware and have an OCR App integrated with the Maker of that product's software.) The preprocessing stages have been universally slow with the different programs I've used. I'm not sure about FR Pro, but with the standard FR for Mac, you can disable image enhancement but you cannot disable individual aspects of it like you can with some other programs. (Even if the Pro version has this feature, modifications to such settings can obviously affect recognition accuracy.)

Does FineReader Pro use 300+ DPI grayscale TIFFs by default? (IIRC this is still considered the ideal for working OCR/ICR, even though the initial files are massive and it definitely makes things slower.) With another program I used, scanning BW at a lower resolution did speed the process, but at the expense of dropping any lighter text/printing at a certain threshold.)

The version of FineReader I have does not have this feature, but the more recent version of FR Pro may have a batch processing setting that allows the OCR tasks to be performed in the background so you can scan more documents faster. However, I can't say how much this will affect the preprocessing stage with this particular App (but, with TeleForm, this makes a very big difference.)