Weird, sudden problem distilling postscript files

[Dov Isaacs]

I will confirm that I have seen this situation every
so often and that the ONLY solution is to reboot your
computer. (By "this situation" I mean oddball results
when using "save as PDF" including but limited to
crashes, failures to produce any output, etc.)

This happens on occasion when using the "save as PDF"
feature of FrameMaker and seemingly the interface between
the PostScript printer driver and the Distiller plug-in
to that driver becomes unstable. That instability is
reset by reboot.

I cannot yet accurately reproduce this happening but
the FrameMaker development team is aware of this (and 
other printing) problems.
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tammy.VanBoening at jeppesen.com
> Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 7:17 AM
> To: Karen Mardahl
> Cc: framers at frameusers.com
> Subject: Re: Weird, sudden problem distilling postscript files
> 
> Fred, Karen, et al.
> 
> Thanks for all of the responses. sorry I didn't respond 
> earlier, but just after I posted this message, my IT guy came 
> down to see if he could troubleshoot  - and at least I was 
> able to reproduce the problem.
> 
> Long story short -
> 
> I will be humming along making PDFs no problem and then boom, 
> all of a sudden, the PDF is either gi-normous (like over 
> 2000%) or I get a series of really small pages all stacked 
> vertically. Sometimes, it will "reset" 
> itself without any rebooting, etc. and other times, I have to either:
> 
> 1.) Just shut down Framemaker, Distiller and PDF and then 
> re-open all the apps.
> 2) Reboot the whole PC.
> 
> I can't find a rhyme or reason to why it happens, when it is 
> going to happen, etc. There's no magic number of generating 
> PDFs or one PDF in particular that causes it. When my IT guys 
> were here, the saw exactly the same thing - he generated the 
> PDF six times in a row with problems, then boom, on the 7th 
> time, it generated just fine without any shut down of apps, 
> rebooting,etc., but then the next go-round, we had to reboot 
> to get a PDF to generate.
> 
> Very annoying problem, and very time consuming and hunting 
> all over the place (googling, Adobe, etc.), I have found the 
> exact same comments/problems but no apparent resolution 
> either than to grit your teeth, take a deep breath and reboot. 
> 
> I wonder if Adobe will have any comments about this eventually.
> 
> Thanks for all the responses - at least what I was seeing was 
> validated by others!
> 
> TVB
> 
> Tammy Van Boening
> Senior Technical Writer
> Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc.
> 303-328-4420
> tammy.vanboening at jeppesen.com