UPDATE: (Windows'9x)+(AdobePS 4.3)+(a-number-of-variables)=>(Entomology 101)

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

FrameMaker & PDF Forum Readers:

This is an UPDATE to email I sent out on Friday, July 16.

If you do not print PostScript or generate PDF files using Windows'9x,
please excuse this intrusion. You may safely ignore this message.

On behalf of Adobe, I wish to thank all members of these forums who
sent email providing symptoms of the problems they encountered as well
as samples. These have been very helpful in isolating the problem to
certain areas of the AdobePS 4.3 driver functionality. I also apologize
for the extreme inconvenience that this problem is causing. If it is
of any comfort to any of you, it has severely cramped my workflows also!

We now know that although the problems have been reported to us
only with relationship to use of AdobePS 4.3 with FrameMaker, the
problems can occur with any application that has the capability to
pass PostScript through to the driver for purposes of providing
EPS support or special Acrobat support.

Thus the following revised information ...


SYMPTOMS:

When printing a "long" document, the system or the application that 
is "printing" appears to "hang" irretrievably or "crash." In the case
of FrameMaker, the most common symptom is that there is no "return"
from the print function back to the application -- the file on the 
print queue is listed as "spooling" and it is impossible to further
access or control any of the print functions including print queues or
printer setup. In the case of Microsoft Word, a system message appears
indicating that "rundll" has crashed followed by a system message
that system resources are critically low and offering the option to
terminate Microsoft Word. In either case, full system restart is
normally necessary. In some cases, restart can only be accomplished
via system hard reboot (system reset key)!


WHAT WE KNOW:

The problem appears NOT to be associated simply with the number of pages 
in the document. The bug in AdobePS 4.2.4 through 4.2.6 that limited
the number of pages to 256 in GDI applications was fixed for AdobePS 4.3.
We have successfully printed some FrameMaker and Microsoft Word documents
with many hundreds of pages with AdobePS 4.3.

Output from applications that generate most, if not all, of their own
PostScript output stream (including Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop,
Adobe PageMaker, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe InDesign, CorelDRAW, Corel Ventura 
Publisher, Macromedia Freehand, and Quark XPress) do not exhibit this
problem.

The problem seems to occur with documents that have one or more the of
the following characteristics:

(a) Large numbers of EPS files and/or images. The problem seems totally
unrelated to the SIZE of such files or images, but rather to the number
of them. Note that an EPS file or image on a master page (FrameMaker) or
header/footer (Word) appears on every page and each occurrence in the 
printed output contributes to the count. One of our sample FrameMaker
documents were successful with 3000 EPS graphics, but failed with 4500
EPS graphics.

(b) Use of the "generate Acrobat data" (FrameMaker) or use of macros
such as PDFMaker (Microsoft Word) which generate PDFMark information via
PostScript passthrough to the driver.

The problem appears to be memory related. Symptoms appear to differ from
system-to-system based upon the available main memory and virtual memory
based upon the size of the paging file. The problem may occur less often
on systems in which the size of the Windows paging "swap" file is allowed
to grow indefinitely -- of course this might seriously interfere with
the ability to output the spool file to disk.

We believe that although we have seen the problem with FrameMaker and
Microsoft Word, there is no reason to believe that the problem wouldn't
also occur with a wide range of GDI applications that have the ability
to pass PostScript through the driver for the purpose of printing EPS.

In all cases, the full print process can be accomplished by "printing
by parts." The problems do not occur is all the pages are printed, but
divided into multiple jobs within the same invocation of the application
program. Thus, we also know that the problem is not cumulative. Assuming
that memory / resources are "leaking", everything appears to be cleaned up
end of each print job from the application.

We know of no similar problem with the AdobePS 4.2.x drivers (where x>=4),
but then again, those versions have a 256 page limit.


WORKAROUNDS:

(1) You can print "by parts." Print the first "n" pages of "m" followed by
the next "n" pages, etc. For creating PDF files, you can combine the PDF
files via the "insert" function of Acrobat.

(2) You can punt back as far as AdobePS 4.2.4, remembering the problems
with the pre-2015 PPD files and that TrueType will yield proper search
results for Acrobat.


ACTION ITEMS:

The bug has been reported to the Adobe PostScript Driver QA and Development
groups along with very simple files (both FrameMaker and Microsoft Word) 
that demonstrate the problem.

We have enough samples and information that we really don't need any further
examples, unless you have information that either contradicts the above or
is significantly different.

We consider this a bug of the highest severity and priority. We currently 
have a driver maintenance release, AdobePS 4.3.1, under development with 
a product release in a September timeframe. We would expect the fix to be 
in that version.

I will report back to these forums when we have any news of substance to
report to you including availability of a fix via AdobePS 4.3.1, other 
workarounds, or requests for additional information.



On a further personal note ... Starting late Friday, I will be "offline" and on a
REAL vacation for approximately two weeks with NO email access. Thus, please do not
expect any responses from me during that time and subsequently until I can catch up
with the accumulated 400+ emails/day that will accumulate.

        

- Dov