RE: Why doesn't Acrobat Assistant run under Windows 2000? [SOLVED]

["Dov Isaacs" <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hedley,

The fact that the "Distiller Assistant" of Acrobat 3.0 acted as a 
"watched folder agent" was not really by design, but rather a hack for 
providing a means by which the PostScript driver could appear to
invoke the Distiller. It effectively required that the PostScript file,
often quite large, reside in the spool file as well as in the
Distiller Assistant's designated folder. It was NOT meant to replace
the watched folder facility of the Distiller in which the running Distiller
watches for new files in one or more designated directories. In other words,
the behaviour that you saw and took advantage of was an undocumented,
side effect of the implementation, not an intended feature.

This was fixed in Acrobat 4 such that the "Acrobat Distiller" print
instance uses a driver plugin and works in conjunction with the acrotray.exe
"stub" to invoke the Distiller in the background, passing the datastream from
the spooling system, parameterizing the Distiller, and show some status in
the "tray." The Acrobat 4 "acrotray.exe" module has very little in common 
with the Acrobat 3 "Distiller Assistant" both in terms of functionality and
implementation.

This behaviour is further enhanced in Acrobat 5 allow you to specify the 
output PDF filename at the time the job is queued, not when it is taken off
the queue. Furthermore, within the printer properties, either global to the
Acrobat Distiller printer instance or local to that instance within a running
application, you can select the job options that you want to use without
having to independently invoke the Distiller first.

With regards to your concern about "footprint" of running Distiller to deal
with watched folders, under Windows 2000 with any reasonable hardware 
configuration, I wouldn't worry about that as any real problem. (Yes, forget
it entirely under Windows'9x/Me!)

There are no plans to move a secondary directory watch facility into the
driver plugin and acrotray.exe stub. Sorry!

        - Dov


At 4/2/2001 09:54 PM, hedley_finger@myob.com.au wrote:
>Framesters:
>
>I recently asked why AcroTray.exe was not running on Windows 2000.  In
>fact, it was.  A number of people reminded me to use Task Manager to check
>what processes were running on my machine and, sure enough, there the
>little fella was.
>
>The reason I was not getting the expected behaviour is that I had installed
>a number of customised Acrobat Distiller "printers" using the new universal
>AdobePS installer.  When the installer wizard asked, I specified a local
>printer on LPT1: -- instead of the PDF Out "port".
>
>Re-assigning the port to PDF Out and a suitable folder caused the expected
>behaviour.
>
>However, it appears that Acrobat Assistant/Distiller Assistant/AcroTray.exe
>no longer watches the (un)watched folders to launch Distiller whenever a
>PostScript file appears.  Pity.  In our workflow I have set up a number of
>watched folders for press or online output, with different options for page
>size, etc. so that the resultant PDF is already residing in the local
>filesystem ready to be checked into the version management database.
>(Distiller will process a PS file in a watched folder but I don't want to
>have it start up automatically every day on the off-chance.  That is what
>AcroTray.exe is for -- small footprint.)
>
>The alternative to these watched folders is
>
>@    to create about twelve Acrobat Distiller "printers" to cover the
>various permutations,
>@    to teach the writers when it appropriate to use them, and
>@    to make sure the writers save the resultant PDFs to the appropriate
>folder to go into the version database.
>
>So, Adobe, will you restore the folder-watching functionality of the
>Assistant in Acrobat 5.1?
>
>[Windows 2000, FrameMaker 6.0p405, FrameScript 1.27C01, Enhance 2.03,
>Acrobat 4.05.2, mif2go 31r25, IXgen 5.5.h]
>
>Regards,
>Hedley


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