Distiller Stopped Working
ScottS
MS Office products.
I have Windows XP Professional Version 2002, Office 2000 (10.2627.2625), Acrobat 5.0.5 (10/26/2001).
I was working on a largish WORD document (~150 pages). I had been able to convert it to PDF yesterday morning. When I tried in the afternoon, however, PDFMaker gets to the point where it says "Printing..." and then
just freezes. I get an error message from the Acrobat Distiller print queue that the printing has failed. PDFMaker just freezes. I went through the troubleshooting guide on adobe.com. I tried making a PDF from a very simple file (just two words) and had the same result. I also get the same result when trying to make PDF from EXCEL or NOTEPAD, and when using the File->Print menu to print to the Acrobat Distiller. However, if I start up Distiller and give it a postscript file, it creates a PDF just fine.
I installed the patches on the adobe website to get up to version 5.0.5,
but with no changes in this behavior.
Anyone have a clue how to fix this?
ejtoll
Distiller process until "printing" stage and then stops. However, I can just print to the distiller, but I lose all bookmarks etc.
I'd like a clue too.
Norman Pavlov
If your problem is the same or similliar to mine, here are some things I have tried to fix this problem and keep it from coming back. You may have tried some or all of these already or you may not like some of these suggestions. Hopefully one of them will help.
First, try to reboot your computer. I mean completely shut it off and then restart. I don't know why, but sometimes MS products seem to get 'stuck' (technical word). This can fix that.
Second, clean up (perform some maintenance) some of those temp files(especially the MS ones). Performing regular maintenance on my computer seems to limit any problems I may encounter, especially with my Microsoft products.
Third, I try to limit the size of my Word document. I know that keeping everything in one document makes it easy for links, bookmarks, etc, but I find that the size can sometimes be a problem. I utilize more office codes (especially when developing a Table of Contents). I seem to have better luck with smaller documents than a huge one. I understand though that this may not always be possible.
If after nothing seems to help to include any other potential fixes from research, I have done a complete unintall and then a reinstall of the product. I call this my last resort though.
Hopefully this is helpfull?? :)
Suzanne Cole
>Sounds like it may be an issue with Microsoft products instead of Adobe.
Very true, and the reason is that it only happens with the PDFMaker macro set in Word.
Sometimes a paragraph format corruption or a normal.dot template corruption can cause problems in your Word document. I would suggest you delete normal.dot (but first, make a copy of it and rename the copy, just in case you need a backup). Make sure Distiller is set as your default printer, and then open Word again.
Also, you might want to make sure that you are not embedding tags in the PDF.
Have you changed any PDFMaker settings in the meantime? You might want to make sure you're not trying to convert some link type or bookmark style that doesn't exist in the current document but that was used in another.
If none of those help, please let us know.
Michael D. Munro
Sometimes Acrobat stays alive as an "active" task.
You might have to "kill" the acrobat.exe process or the acrodist.exe process before it works right again.
Hope this helps.
Laith Ibrahim
Let's hear from the experts.
Laith
Anton Zoettl
<graphi...@yahoo.com> wrotg:
>I guess that this problem happens mostly with WIN XP users and I'm one of them and hence I have the same problem. Every time I want to pdf a file I create the .ps file by printing to file and then distilling it to create the PDF. I don't think the solutions mentioned here are not practical, they might help with some cases but they're not the perfect remedy.
>Let's hear from the experts.
>Laith
I have the same problem. The conversion stopped even when I tried to
convert one Word Page.
I de- and reinstalled Acrobat. Now it works again (for how long ???)
Anton
Judy Foster
J.
Laith Ibrahim
I haven't looked thoroughly for a solution because I can always use another way to make PDFs. I installed a virtual Post Script printer on my computer (like Tecktronix 780), I print to file, then drag the .ps file created by the printer into Acrobat Distiller which will create the PDF without problems. I don't know why it doesn't PDF files from inside applications. I hope that this solution will work for you.
Regards,
Laith
Suzanne Cole
What environment are you in (hardware, software/versions)?
Exactly what steps do you use to convert to PDF?
What exactly do you mean by Distiller locking up? Is it possible to tell at what point in the document this happens? Have you looked for PostScript errors -- or if you're using PDFMaker (the Acrobat icon in Word) have you looked at the log file?
Laith,
>I don't think the solutions mentioned here are not practical, they might
help with some cases but they're not the perfect remedy.
What is a "perfect remedy?" Some problems can have many different causes, and may vary on different hardware and software configurations, so for each cause and configuration there might be one or more solutions that work for an individual problem. In other words, due to sheer diversity of development in the realm of computing, there may never be one "perfect remedy" for any apparent problem. To expect one is unrealistic.
>Let's hear from the experts.
Which experts? This is a user-to-user forum, so the people who come here are sharing their individual expertise voluntarily. If you want Adobe technical support you'll need to contact Adobe, and hear from their experts for a fee.
Laith Ibrahim
I have no comments about the solutions that were previously posted.
As for the "let's hear from the experts" I would like to say that there are experts within the users who come hear to share their experience. Perhaps you are one of them:)
Regards,
Laith
Suzanne Cole
>Perhaps you are one of them:)
Flattery will get you everywhere!
Unfortunately, much as I would like to count this as true, I'm nowhere near in the same league as most of the regulars here. I just do what I can with what I know, or can guess, or can work through. It's all fun to me.
Laith Ibrahim
I guess everybody is having fun here. Sometimes we solve problems, sometimes we ask questions and most of the times reading answers for other questions. I learned so much here.
Take care:)
Laith
