RE: Save as PDF vs Print to PS and then Distill

["Snavely, Deborah" <dsnavely@xxxxxxxx>]

Jay, you hit the nail on the head. FAQ is great if new users know to look
for them.

Meanwhile, my understanding of the difference between the two dates back to
early 1995 when I got to take Adobe's own Electronic Publishing class (circa
Acrobat 2.1). There's a major difference between the Mac platform and the
Windows platform in this Frame operation: Mac/Frame 5.1.1 "Save as PDF"
operation simply automated the two-step process of printing to a PostScript
driver (I never had to fuss with using a Distiller-specific driver on Mac
before OS8 but now I do) and then running the Distiller on the resulting
file. On Win95, nothing at all works except printing to the Acrobat
Distiller 3.0 driver and then Distilling. 

I suspect that the Win/Frame "Save as PDF" operation is roughly equivalent
to using the Mac Acrobat (virtual) print driver called "PDFwriter", which
generates quick-and-dirty PDF from just about any application but does NOT
retain graphic quality for EPS or generate good fonts. (It did save problems
when a particular legacy document included a page whose graphics simply
WOULD not distill; for such, I created a PDF of the rest of the book in two
chunks by the preferred method, then inserted one crummy-but-readable page
of the problem page using PDFwriter because the document's source graphics
were no longer available.)

For any platform, using any source software, the good method of getting a
file into PDF is to put everything you need (including fonts and hyperlinks)
into the cleanest PostScript file you can generate using an Acrobat-specific
driver and then Distill. Simple, but it takes a little explaining. 

For Frame, this means we need an RFE that recommends deleting the "Save as
PDF" function or re-naming it "Save as DRAFT PDF".

Deborah Snavley



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