[i_wolf]

Hi Guys,
I installed Office 2004 full installation. I recently bought acrobat professional and it created the extra adobe menu bar in word.
The problem I am having is that when I cliek the adobe save as pdf button, two things happen, first of all the the 'normal' inbuilt OS X save as pdf bar scrolls across nice and quickly. Following this Acrobat PDF Maker opens up and slowly (must emphasize slowly, especially on a dual 2GHz G5 with 2gigs of ram) makes its way across the screen before stopping at about 90%. It hangs here, and I then have to click cancel to stop the job.
Sometime the file is actually created in the background, othertimes not.
I have done a repair permissions, forced OS X maintenance with 'sudo periodic daily/ weekly/monthly' and I have updated the prebindings.
As far as I can tell everything should be tip top.
So can you tell me a few things since Im new to acrobat on mac platform

1) Should the official PDF writer (acrobat) be so much slower than using the inbuilt OS X save as pdf feature??
2) What advantages does using the PDF writer in word have over say OS X's save as PDF feature and then opening and amending the permissions in acrobat after that.
3) Is anybody else having this problem where the progress bar hangs at 90% in PDF writer and word?
4) Could the hangin at 90% explain why PDF writer is not generating the TOC from the word document?

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Regards
i_wolf

P.S. i am running with all the latest Adobe PDF updates 6.0.1

[i_wolf]

ok... doing some more investigating, trying to run an word doc through adobe distiller produces an error. Could this possibly be a compatibility problem between word documents and distiller???
Could somebody else try and see how they get on? It could in all honesty be me mucking something up, but I have my suspicions.

[typoon]

I'm not sure. Usually when I need to save as PDF I just do it right from the App.

[beverson]

Originally posted by i_wolf:
ok... doing some more investigating, trying to run an word doc through adobe distiller produces an error. Could this possibly be a compatibility problem between word documents and distiller???
Could somebody else try and see how they get on? It could in all honesty be me mucking something up, but I have my suspicions.

I'm not sure how it works on Windows, and I just got Acrobat Professional 6 myself, but in every previous version of Distiller with which I have experience you have to run a PostScript file through it to get a PDF -- I know of no way to run a Word document through Distiller to get a PDF (if I'm wrong, anyone please correct me).

To answer one of your other questions:

2) What advantages does using the PDF writer in word have over say OS X's save as PDF feature and then opening and amending the permissions in acrobat after that.

When creating a PDF from OS X Print dialogs, you have no control over the quality or size of the final PDF. The quality is generally very good, but sometimes you want to sacrifice some of that quality to get a much smaller file. I can generally make PDFs much smaller, useful for posting online, by Distilling a .ps file than I can through OS X's save as PDF feature. LOTS more control over quality (compression, etc.) too.

In case you don't know how to do this, the easiest way to make a .ps file is to save as a file from the print dialog and chose PostScript as the file format (you can usually pick PDF here too, but it'll be the same as if you chose PDF earlier instead of Print). This PostScript file is the same that your Mac would send to a PS printer. This generally works best if you are creating a PS file while "printing" using an actual PostScript printer. If you don't have access to a PS printer, it's generally best to set up a generic PS printer at localhost and use this dummy printer description to make PS files. This is what I do at home since I only have an inkjet here. You should be able to find instructions on creating a localhost virtual printer if you do a search -- it's been a while since I set mine up, so I don't remember quite how to do it.

[philzilla]

Originally posted by i_wolf:
P.S. i am running with all the latest Adobe PDF updates 6.0.1

as of a few days ago, the latest version is 6.0.2, so download the upgrade and see if that fixes anything for you.

[Randman]

Yes, there are two updates with 6.0.2 being the latest. Install those and things should be all right.

[mitchell_pgh]

Acrobat , Save as PDF and Word PDF are all meant for different things.

Adobe can do many things none of the others can like add notes etc. etc.

Save as PDF is a lower quality way to create PDF files. (don't get me wrong, they aren't bad, but you don't have the full range of options)

Word PDF is similar to save as PDF.

[alex_kac]

The one thing I want to complain about is that on Windows, Word to PDF via Acrobat keeps TOC links and such. Not on the Mac version of Acrobat. Very annoying and the only reason I use Acrobat 4 on Windows instead of my nice new Acrobat 6 on OS X 90% of the time.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by alex_kac:
The one thing I want to complain about is that on Windows, Word to PDF via Acrobat keeps TOC links and such. Not on the Mac version of Acrobat. Very annoying and the only reason I use Acrobat 4 on Windows instead of my nice new Acrobat 6 on OS X 90% of the time.

TOC links?

[luke_in_tas]

Why does Adobe fail to provide Mac users of Acrobat with the same functionality that Windows users enjoy?

Using Acrobat 5 on OS X was a dreadful experience. There was no Distiller driver, no integration with Microsoft Office, and no ability to scan documents. When Acrobat 6 came out I was eager to upgrade, but it has done little to improve my opinion.

Although Acrobat 6 attempts to address these problems, it hasn’t done a very good job of it. Although there is now a Distiller printer driver, the Microsoft Office integration is poor. Acrobat 6 installs icons to create PDFs in the Office toolbar, but these buttons create a PDF in exactly the same manner as if the document had been printed to the Distiller driver. Consequently, there is no automatic creation of bookmarks in a PDF document from Word styles or links. A bitterly disappointing find for anyone who has used this feature (which forces me to use Acrobat 5 on Windows when I want to do this).

Added to this, as has previously been noted, using the Acrobat installed buttons sometimes fails to produce a document. It seems the best way to produce a PDF from Word is to use the Print option from the File menu and then select "Adobe PDF" from the printer list. It is then possible to select the desired output quality using the "PDF Options" section from the options drop down.

Further, my hope that scanning issues would be fixed has also been dashed. Although this feature now exists, it only supports scanners that use TWAIN drivers. Of course, not the case for my Canon scanner, which uses Photoshop plug-ins under OS X. Although not entirely Adobe’s fault (Canon: where are the TWAIN drivers for OS X?), why is Acrobat unable to use the plug-ins that work perfectly well with two of their other products (Photoshop and Photoshop Elements)?

For others who bemoan these lack of features, I suggest that you all make your feelings known to Adobe on their feature request link: http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html.

[threestain]

Just to resurrect this thread rather than start a new one:

I have the adobe pdf toolbar appear in word. However, I like it in a line with the normal toolbar - so I get extra space on the desktop. But it never stays there - I have to drag it there every time and its really annoying!

Anyone know of a way to keep it fixed?

[radii_22]

Incredible...

I did not know that Acrobat 6 does not support bookmarking and links from Word documents. That's so bad when you spend a lot of time styling your document in Word (a large one, say, 60 pages), and you want to share it in PDF (including chapters, links, etc). I believed that Acrobat did those things. Little naif of me.

So, what product can be used by us, Mac users, to generate PDF's instead of Acrobat? I guess that I will have to learn LaTex.

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