ApplePDFKit behaves differently on Apple Silicon than Intel Mac

DEVONthink
1

I have a 2019 iMac (intel) and a 2020 Air M1 (Apple silicon),
and they behave differently with PDFs.
(Both have DT3 3.9.2 and the ABBY Finereader OCR is updated)

  1. the OCR tab in DT3’s preference is different.
    On the Air, I can choose “As Source” in PDF Resolution as well as values from 150 to 600.
    On the iMac, there is no selection dropdown at all.

  2. When I OCR the same PDF file,
    the size of OCRed PDFs is smaller in size but noticeably sharper in resolution on the Air.
    On the iMac, it is blurred although the size is slightly bigger. “Compress PDF” is unchecked on both devices. And the “PDF Resolution” is 300 on the iMac. It seems that I can’t use the greater value than 300 on the iMac.

  3. Surprisingly, I can highlight unOCRed PDFs on the Air, whereas I can’t on the iMac.
    Similarly, on the iMac I can’t annotate many PDFs (mostly Korean) since the iMac consider those as corrupted. But on the Air, I can annotate those PDF without an issue.
    see my previous post

I don’t know why they behave differently.
Any ideas?

2

It’s not related to the PDFkit. The OCR engines on both platforms are not completely identical, the Apple Silicon version is a slightly newer one (not available/reliable for Intel unfortunately yet) and having therefore different preferences.

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3

Most likely due to live text on the latest macOS versions.

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4

Yes, I think so, but the thing is that, the intel Mac is also on the latest MacOS, but on the intel Mac I can’t do things that I can do on the M1 Air.

5

I’m not sure if live text is actually supported on all Intel Macs. And Sonoma will add more features which require Apple Silicon.

6

Is Live Text enabled on the Intel Mac in System Settings > General > Language & Region?

7

Yes, it is enabled.

8

See this blog post for information on this…

9

You say the Apple silicon version of the OCR engine is slightly newer than the Intel one. Does this mean there improvements that might give me an additional excuse to upgrade my 2018 Mac mini (Intel) to an M2 one? Or are any improvements completely trivial?

10

I wouldn’t say there are substantial enough improvements to OCR to justify a machine update.

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11

There was I hoping that it would help me justify the new machine I have been wanting for a while. I looked at the release notes but they just mention fixing a problem that only arises on Apple silicon. Thanks for the advice.

12

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