Once again, I lost my Adobe PDF printer by doing an Archive and Install. In case this happens to anyone else who needs to print to Distiller, from the Adobe forums is still relevant:. Quit Acrobat and Print Center if they are running. Delete the AdobePDF.app application that's installed in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/. Launch Acrobat 6. You will be prompted to authenticate the installer by entering your password.
Oct 11, 2005 Okay - my Adobe PDF printer just went MIA today. The only thing that updated in the past two days was Acrobat Pro. The Adobe PDF printer folder is still in place, as are the PPDs. I compared this to my mirror (RAID) drive which has not backed up this week, and all the files appear to be the same, and in the same place. No problem, you can print documents, webpages, or nearly anything as a PDF, this means it creates a PDF file directly in Mac OS X using a built-in feature, without the need for any additional software or apps.
Launch Print Center and verify that Adobe PDF has been added to the printer list. On one machine that I upgraded, I had to restart before Adobe PDF showed up as a printer. Distiller 6 prints to PDF v1.3 (Acrobat 4), which flattens all transparencies to bitmaps. Many 'low-end' or 'mid-end' print bureaus here in Europe still deliver the best results with this PDF format only. Distiller can also selectively compress embedded images, that's quite an important factor if you post your PDFs on the web. The OS X PDF doesn't compress very well, in Panther you can set up some ColorSync filters for compression, but it's not obvious and you need.know.
what you are doing to get useful results. You can do that in OSX 10.4 without Distiller.
In 10.4 they added PDF-X support which uses a subset of features, including flattening transparencies and drop shadows. When you go to print a file in any app, the 'Save as PDF' button from 10.3 now is a dropdown. These PDF Workflows are created using Automator so you can even create your own. I've got a number of different ones including one that compresses down to decent sizes for the web.
The Workflows are stored in /Library/PDF Services Create your own by loading Automator, dropping a 'Apply Quartz filter' action from the PDF library and then editing the advanced settings to your requirements. I had to use PDF-X for converting PDFs in Pages/Keynote for use in older Adobe applications which don't support the latest PDF specs.
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After installing some recent Apple updates, my PDF printer stopped working, yet again. This time the solution was to quite printer setup utility, acrobat, safari, and any office applications. Then remove /usr/libexec/cups/backend/pdf800 (the cups printer backend that Acrobat installs). The safe way to do that is to open the Terminal, cd to /usr/lib/cups/backend, and sudo rm pdf800 (you must be permitted to administer the computer, you will be prompted for your password).
Then launch Acrobat. It will notice the pdf printer is missing and reinstall it (also prompting you for your password). As to why you want to do this over the built-in OS X pdf services, Distiller still provides additional controls that are needed for professional work that are not available in the built-in service.