FM-9.0p237 - Distiller 8.1.0 colour/font odds

[Michael Müller-Hillebrand]

Am 18.06.2009 um 16:57 schrieb Art Campbell:

> your sequence of PDFs and posts seems to confirm the long-standing
> ideas that:
>
> 1.) SaveAs PDF from within FrameMaker uses a different workflow and
> different options than Printing to a PDF logical printer, and

When I once compared a PostScript file created by both workflows they  
were almost identical (apart from some different dates). As I  
understand, the original problem was connected to the fact that during  
Save As PDF the process did not always successfully switch to the  
Adobe PDF printer. Some people with FrameMaker 7.x report that on  
certain machines (not every machine!) Save As PDF works fine if they  
make Adobe PDF the default printer. So in my opinion it is more of an  
Acrobat or general installation issue than something with FrameMaker.

> 2.) SaveAs PDF is not the preferred method of creating a PDF. It's
> been broken or flakey in multiple (all?) releases, and there have
> been, or still are, problems in FM 9.


It seems to me this will be a long-standing legend. The development  
team apparently invested quite a bit into this process. Try to catch  
the .tps file when using FrameMaker 9’s Save As PDF process, it is  
very hard. Certain features are only available using Save As PDF.

I say that Save As PDF _is_ _now_ the preferred way to create PDFs.  
You have to clear installation issues, of course. And I admit that  
some people have machines with issues. Even I had some problems when  
starting with FrameMaker 9 & Acrobat 9 initially, but the Microsoft  
hotfix solved those printer driver memory problems (it was not a  
FrameMaker issue!):

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952909/en-us>

Whenever I do some programming for clients to create multiple PDF  
files in a row, I always use Save As PDF (with some programmatic  
pauses to give Distiller some room to breathe).

Recalling two more things from the last years, where in the end  
FrameMaker 7 was not to blame:

* One client couldn't distill a very large PostScript (300+ Mbyte)  
file successfully. The exact same PostScript file worked okay at my  
machine (in a 512 MByte RAM virtual XP machine).

* One client had a computer where a few times a week Distiller would  
report a PostScript error. When the file was subsequently distilled  
manually there was no problem. The machine served some network  
management purposes as well. As soon as the FrameMaker production  
tasks were installed on a separate machine, everything was fine again.

My bottom line: Since we are all working a lot with FrameMaker, we  
tend to blame it for things that may have its cause in other, darker  
places inside our computers. I am not saying that FrameMaker is bug- 
free. But there is no reason to warn against using Save As PDF.

- Michael

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_______________________________________________________________
Michael Müller-Hillebrand: Dokumentations-Technologie
Adobe Certified Expert, FrameMaker
Lösungen und Training, FrameScript, XML/XSL, Unicode
Blog: http://cap-studio.de/ - Tel. +49 (9131) 28747