<<You should first try to print to file using the specific printer driver
you
are printing to. Select the print to file box. >>
This will only work if the printer driver used is a PostScript printer
driver.
Which means no inkjet printer drivers (Epson/canon/Lexmark/hp) should be
used.
Very often I have seen "dual personality" laser drivers (laser capable of
PCL or PS such as HP) fail to produce postscript to file even when printing
using the PostScript driver. If you don't know what you are doing, it will
drive you nutz trying to distill a PCL "print to file" because it won't work
and everything you are doing seems (and often is) correct. This is a driver
problem.
Adobe strongly recommends using the Distiller printer driver for generating
postscript files destined to be distilled. I concur. There are those who
claim one must use the driver/ppd for their imagesetter model because the
PostScript must contain certain device specific commands; they are kidding
themselves if they think Distiller is going to retain any of that--it will
not.
The problem many have using the Distiller as a printer is that the standard
installation sets it up to automatically generate a PDF via a helper ole
service that (behind the curtain and hidden from view) first generates a
postscript file then opens distiller (using whatever job options happened to
be set last time it was closed) and then distills the file. Too often this
process fails and one is left wondering what the heck happened.
the solution to this is to change the port setting for the distiller printer
driver to "file" from "PDF Port". Then distiller will make a Postscript file
and not try to distill it. The hitch with this (always those, right?) is
with W2K or XP you won't get a friendly dialog box or directory tree to use
for locating where you want to put the file. All you get is a cold,
efficient pop up where you need to type the whole dang thing.
drive:\path\filename.extension (to save on typing, I usually dump it onto
the root directory of my D:\ partition...those who have a CD as the D:\
drive might use the root of the C:\ drive.)
A slightly more efficient way (if doing a lot of files) would be to have
distiller set up watched folders in the root of C:\ (the watched "in" folder
will then be "C:\in\". when distiller is running (with the correct job
options settings). Thus one would print to distiller and when the pop up
asks for filename, you'd enter "C:\in\filename.ps" and as soon as distiller
sees it it will process the file, moving both the created pdf and the
original PS file to the c:\out directory. I don't recall seeing this process
fail if a proper postscript file was made (and I don't believe it needs the
ps extension...distiller will start chewing on anything put in the in
folder)
