OS X PDF creation

[Steve Rickaby]

At 9:38 am -0800 12/1/06, William Herr wrote:

>I just discovered the Folder Actions capability. This lets you assign a
>canned script to a folder. One of those is convert Postscript to pdf.
>
>Does anyone use this routinely?
>
>If it is robust then for a basic author like me, why do I need acrobat?

This script likely uses the PDF rendered built into the Quartz engine, or wherever. Apple don't claim that this creates publication-quality PDFs, and indeed it does not. However, if you only need to achieve on-screen legibility for circulation of reports, etc., it may well be suitable for your needs. You can achieve the same thing by 'printing to PDF' from any OS X-native app - the PDF renderer is accessible from the print dialog - although of course this does not apply to Mac FrameMaker.

>One can see why Adobe may be losing motivation to support OS X. Now if just
>Pages could grow up quickly - but I know this is a pipe dream.

Yes, and will likely remain so. Apple's built-in apps aren't trying to hit the professional market. That's not to say that they might not create a pro documentation app at some point, but I'm not putting my money on it.
-- 
Steve