RE: FAQ wrt Printing & PDF & Some Personal Notes

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 2/5/99 05:54 AM , Lin Morss wrote:
>	Thanks for that highly informative email, Dov! Good timing. I just
>held a mini-training class for our new Frame converts on how to create and
>use PDFs. Someone asked why they can't just use the Save As PDF option,
>since it seems to do the same thing as printing to postscript. The only
>difference we could see was that the distilling process was "automatic" and
>the postscript file had a .tps suffix (what is that?). In your email, you
>said:
>
>>From FrameMaker, create PDF files via the "print" function going to the
>Distiller Assistant's "printer", NOT the "save as PDF" function. Results
>are more predictable (I won't get into why in this forum) 
>
>If you don't want to get into why in this forum, can someone at least give
>me something to tell our staff as a reasonable explanation? Everyone's
>getting really sick of hearing me say, "It's just better/safer/more stable
>to do it this way." We'd like to understand exactly what problems we should
>anticipate, and your email is a good, concise start. (BTW, I have gone to
>the archives numerous times looking for messages I *know* should be there,
>and have yet to have a successful search; if anyone has any insight beyond
>"idiotic user error" they'd like to impart as far as how to not end up with
>listings from the poodle-lovers newsgroup when I search for PDF, I'm all
>ears!)
>
>Have a great weekend, all!
>-Lin


My recommendation NOT to use the "save as PDF" function stems from
some observations in attempting to use it.

When you print to a "printer" that is hooked into the Distiller Assistant
and was properly associated with the proper PPD file for the Distiller,
you know exactly what you are getting.

When you "save as PDF", FrameMaker APPEARS to be printing to the CURRENT
PostScript printer, but diverted to a file name and hence force-fed to
the Distiller. Thus, if your "current printer" is a monochrome 
PostScript version 2010-based GlurbishMonger 5000 that doesn't support 
TrueType as Type 42, you might well end up with a PDF file with colors
lost in images and marginal, at best, TrueType text display and print.

	- Dov

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