PDF Options menu in print dialog

[ddirks]

This is a two part question/problem.

First part: When printing from Word 2004 SP2 to Adobe PDF (Acrobat
6.0.2 Professional) on Mac OS 10.3.9, the PDF document becomes garbled
when attempting to look at it on a Windows XP machine. It seems as
though Word (or Adobe) is using a font that Windows does not recognize.
Anyone know any workarounds to make sure that this works properly?
There is another computer in the office with the exact same setup and
it works successfully. Not sure what this other guy is going wrong or
has changed in his settings.

Second part: Normally, when you go to File->print and choose Adobe PDF,
there is a 'PDF Options' in the drop-down menu for configuration. Does
anyone know where this comes from? The computer that is having the
printing problem does not have this option.

 

[Elliott Roper]

This is a two part question/problem.

First part: When printing from Word 2004 SP2 to Adobe PDF (Acrobat
6.0.2 Professional) on Mac OS 10.3.9, the PDF document becomes garbled
when attempting to look at it on a Windows XP machine. It seems as
though Word (or Adobe) is using a font that Windows does not recognize.
Anyone know any workarounds to make sure that this works properly?
There is another computer in the office with the exact same setup and
it works successfully. Not sure what this other guy is going wrong or
has changed in his settings.

You are probably on the right track. Make sure that Acrobat is
embedding the fonts. Sorry for the vague advice; my copy of Acrobat is
terminally insane, so my tricks, like using Distiller from a different
account won't be any good for you. I avoid Acrobat whenever I can, and
use the print to PDF that comes with OS X's preview.

Second part: Normally, when you go to File->print and choose Adobe PDF,
there is a 'PDF Options' in the drop-down menu for configuration. Does
anyone know where this comes from? The computer that is having the
printing problem does not have this option.

Acrobat poos all over your system when you install anything vaguely
related. It is highly likely that one of your users tried with more
success to wipe its bottom.

I'd ask again, but on the matching Acrobat support group, where you
might find someone with a higher tolerance to maldesigned software than
I have.

PS on a related note, I did some experimenting with Apple's print to
PDF under Tiger. One of the quartz filter options produced excellent
results. Word 2004's print to PDF made a 400KB file of a single page
with two fonts, an eps signature, a horizontal line, and a small jpg.
Printing to ps and then in preview saving as pdf while applying the
compress quartz filter option produced a pdf of 172KB which left the
picture very slightly worse off, but did a beautiful job on the eps,
unlike the unusable daggy pile of pixels that Word made.

The "reduce file size" filter did a similar job apart from savaging the
jpg. At 57KB, it would be acceptable for web and e-mail if not for
printing.

Not that the colorsync utility is the unexpected tool for fiddling with
these quartz filters. You can change how much images are compressed
etc.

 

[Neill Massello]

Second part: Normally, when you go to File->print and choose Adobe PDF,
there is a 'PDF Options' in the drop-down menu for configuration. Does
anyone know where this comes from? The computer that is having the
printing problem does not have this option.

Mu guess is that this is provided by the AdobePDF plugin file in
/Library/Printers/PPD Plugins. That file probably needs to match the
version of the Adobe PDF ppd file in
/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources (in the lproj folders).