Distiller vs. PDFWriter

[Wei Chen]

Hi all,

we currently use PDFWriter to automatically generate PDF reports. However I understand that PDFWriter is no longer supported and is not included in Adobe 6.0. Someone in the forum told me that Distiller is currently the replacement for PDFWriter in report generation. My question is, what are some of the pros and cons of using Distiller and where I can find some sample code.

TIA.

[GaryA]

To use Distiller programatically you'll need the Acrobat SDK. You can check <http://partners.adobe.com> Some info is free but for the full SDK you'll have to join ASN.

[vickie r anderson]

I have Windows 2000 and Adobe Framemaker 5.5 with Adobe Acrobat 4.0. Everytime I try to create a Acrobat distiller or a PDF file from the Framemaker book, I get a Framemaker error that states, "Cannot write to specified print file." I have remove Adobe Acrobat 4.0 and loaded 6.0, but I still get the same error.

Does anyone have a fix for this problem?

[Volker_Kl...@adobeforums.com]

Distiller is normally set up to watch specific folders (at least one) and convert any PS file dumped into that to PDF output. So it can be easily used by other programs generating PostScript output, in a queue approach, and thus not deadlock-prone. If you put the PS file into the watched folder, you don't even need to invoke Distiller (as long as your Acrobat Assistant is running, or on Unix the distiller daemon). Or you can invoke Distiller from your program and use it as a filter: PS in, PDF out.

For discussions on the advantages of PDFwriter vs. Distiller printer search the Acrobat website, this has been discussed to death already. Essentially, PDFwriter is a dumb little printer thingie, not very powerful, but also not very resource-intensive, and can thus be much more end-user friendly for simple documents. All advanced functionality needs Distiller, e.g. the PDFmaker macros that allow for one-button PDF creation in all those MS apps (and use VBA under the hood).