How to make a PDF from a Frame book using PDF Converter by Nuance

[Fred Ridder]

Emmy Aricioglu wrote (in part):
 
> The purchasing people also told me that Adobe told
> them that PDF Converter does work with Frame. This is
> what I am trying to confirm. When I open PDF
> Converter, it is not able to find the .fm files. So
> how can it work with Frame?
 
I think you've got a fundamental misconception of how
PDF creation (with any tool) works. Unless you are using
a tool like Adobe Illustrator or InDesign, which "understand"
PostScript internally, making a PDF is *NOT* a type of file 
format conversion, regardless of the name of the tool or 
the menu command that you may use to make your PDF 
(e.g. the Save As PDF command in FrameMaker, which 
I never use and generally recommend against). Making a 
PDF from most desktop applications is a *rendering* 
process, fundamentally the same as printing the document 
to paper. In one approach you print the document to a 
PostScript file that you then convert to PDF (since 
PostScript and PDF use essentially the same code to
render the image of each page) using Acrobat Distiller
or some equivalent tool. The other approach is to print 
the file to a special printer driver that directly produces 
a PDF file containing all the rendered page images. 
 
With FrameMaker and Distiller, you simply print a document 
to the virtual printer named "Adobe PDF", and you get a 
PDF as the result. With PDF Converter, you print the 
document to the virtual printer that is created when that
tool is installed. 
 
You never open a FramMaker file (or a Word file or an Excel
file) from Acrobat or Adobe Reader or from Distiller, so why 
should you expect to be able to open a FrameMaker file
from PDF Converter?
 
The one thing I can't say for certain, since it has been 
about two years since I briefly evaluated (and rejected)
the PDF Converter tool is whether it recognizes the extra
data for interactive features (e.g., hyperlinked x-refs, TOC,
LOT, LOF, index, live URLs) that FrameMaker embeds in 
its PostScript output when you turn on the "Generate
Acrobat Data" option in the FrameMaker Print dialog. 
Without that capability, you are sacrificing significant 
functionality by using PDF Converter rather than the 
Acrobat tool suite.
 
-Fred Ridder
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