Adobe Distiller - Batch Automation

INTRODUCTION

Experimented briefly with Adobe Distiller. The goal was to get it running as part of a batch process so that it could generate Microsoft Word documents (.doc) into .pdf files. Turns out that what seems simple is not so simple. Here are the results of my trials:

GETTING STARTED

1. Installed Adobe Acrobat 6.0 (standard).
2. Created a .joboptions file (basically used the Standard.joboptions provided in the \Distillr\Settings directory).
3. Created a Windows batch file (see below) to launch Distiller.

RESOURCES USED

Below is the batch file using Adobe Distiller command line options:

========== BEGIN BATCH FILE ==========
: Acrobat Distiller Batch File

: Set the environment
SET ACROBAT_HOME=C:\apps\adobe\acrobat
SET PATH=%PATH%;%ACROBAT_HOME%/Distillr

: Run Acrobat Distiller
acrodist.exe /J “c:/misc/standard.joboptions” /N /O “c:/misc/test.pdf” /Q “c:/misc/test.doc”
========== END BATCH FILE ===========

CONCLUSION

Decided not to get involved with attempting to debug postscript errors when generating PDF files. Hard to debug. Plus, it looks like one would need to configure a new printer configuration for PDF files only. So it wouldn’t be easy to simply have a copy of Adobe Distiller installed on each machine that you want to generate PDF files for. You would also have to configure the printer and possibly other settings. Anyway, getting back to the debugging issue, using the batch file (shown above) yields this kind of log file:

========== BEGIN LOG FILE ==========
%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: ?]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%
========== END LOG FILE ==========

Yeah, that’s really helpful. Will have to revisit this latter but for now it is easy enough to manually click the Convert to Adobe PDF button within Word to create the desired PDF file.

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