Acrobat/Distiller

[Tracey Showalter <tshowalt -at- SCTCORP -dot- COM>]

Karen wrote:

  I'm having a problem using Acrobat on Word files, and Adobe tells me that
  if I buy the Distiller (for lots of money, I'm sure), my problems will be
  over. They are unwilling to show me, however, by converting a test file
  of about 4 pages.

And LaVonna answered:

  I would not call it a "lack of support."  They have two products:
  Acrobat and Acrobat Pro (which we just bought).  Pro contains the
  distiller, which you can probably buy separately.  (Yes, it is
  expensive; Acrobat Pro retails for approx $400.)  You need the
  distiller when your original file contains .eps files.  (Correct me
  if I am wrong folks.  I *am* an Acrobat newbie.)

And I'm adding:

You can buy Acrobat 2.0 (about $130;1 copy of Exchange), Acrobat Pro (about
$400;1 copy of Exchange, 1 copy of Distiller), or Acrobat for Workgroups
(about $1100; 10 copies of Exchange, 1 copy of Distiller, 1 copy of Catalog).
Pro is the closest you can get to buying Distiller separately (or at least
that's what our rep told me).

We'll be using the Distiller instead of PDF Writer/Exchange so that we can
embed typefaces easily and to improve the appearance of graphics. Our graphics
are usually tiffs, but sometimes eps, PICT, or some other miscellaneous
format.

My notes say to use Distiller when for files with eps images, to
downsample/compress images, when PDF Writer doesn't work well (especially with
colors, gradients/fills).

We had an evaluation copy of Workgroup a few months ago--you can probably get
one by contacting a local Adobe rep. I highly recommend doing this if you can.


Another advantage to using Distiller: You can set up "watched" directories.
Keep Distiller open (it can run in the background on a Mac, though doing so
does seem to conflict with complicated QuicKeys sequences). Whenever a
PostScript file is put into a watched directory, Distiller automatically
processes it. You can do a lot of overnight processing this way.


Tracey Showalter
tshowalt -at- sctcorp -dot- com