Acrobat Distiller instances

[Lance...@adobeforums.com]

Hi

we use a product called Formscape that has a built in object to start Distiller and passes a PS file that converts to a PDF to a location of your choice. This works fine. We can also send PS file to a watched folder location that Distiller picks up and converts to PDF. That works fine too.

In the past, we have had Distiller running as an application monitoring watched folders and have had Formscape starting distiller automatically to create PDF's and these have both worked fine together (on the same server). For some reason now, we cannot do this. If we have Distiller running as an application and Formscape starts another instance, Formscape hangs until the timeout reaches 5 minutes and then we get an error advising the PDF could not be created.

It looks like for some reason, Distiller cannot run more than one instance - this has been tried on V5, V7 & V8. I run it locally on may laptop wioth V5 & V7 with the same results. Ideally, this needs to work on the Win2003 server where it used to work.

Any one got any ideas on this.

Regards

Lance

[Bill@VT]

You have another issue if you are using the standard distribution of Acrobat. Distiller is not licensed for this use (on a server). For that use, you should be using the Distiller Server. It may be that the Distiller Server would also resolve the multiple instance issues you are having.

[Lance...@adobeforums.com]

Are you saying then that normal Distiller cannot run more than a single instance on a win2003 server even though this has been achieved in the past?

[Bill@VT]

This is a license issue, not an issue of the ability of Distiller to do what you asked. That may also be why you are not getting help from others. Not using Acrobat or it's parts in a server application has been part of the license since AA5 I think. The functionality may not have changed much in terms of the ability to do it, but the EULA specifically notes it as a violation. There are options to use Distiller on a server, but this is an issue that has to be negotiated with Adobe and is not part of the standard license. For server applications, a lot of folks go to other products to produce online PDFs. You might check on some of the services that do this such as PS2PDF etc, if you want to use a server.

I may spark some comments from others, but the general use of the standard distribution of Acrobat on a server violates the EULA.