Re: Help with RTF Post-production Using PDF Distiller

Subject: Re: Help with RTF Post-production Using PDF Distiller
From: Tony Graham <tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 1999 21:44:16 -0400 (EST)
At 3 Sep 1999 08:41 -0400, G. Ken Holman wrote:
 > I see there are fewer "job options" in PDFWriter than Distiller, and I 
 > can't get the watermark I need in *one* of my many cases (so perhaps I can 
 > live without it).  I had understood that somehow Distiller was "better" 
 > than PDFWriter.
 > 
 > Can anyone point me to a comparison of PDFWriter vs. Distiller?  Why would 
 > I use one instead of the other?

We've found two problems with using PDFWriter instead of Distiller, so
now we only use Distiller.

1. Word's formatting is intimately tied to its idea of the output
   device. It may have been because we were using a custom page size,
   but we were getting different page breaks when we printed to PDF
   compared to when we printed drafts to our PostScript printer.  Word
   could inexplicably fit one or two characters less per line when we
   printed to PDF, which was enough to throw off our pagination.  We
   switched to distilling PostScript files so we wouldn't get those
   little surprises in our final deliveries.

2. Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files in our documents were appearing
   as empty boxes (or not appearing at all, I can't remember) when we
   printed to PDF.  They appear correctly when you print PostScript to
   a file and distill that file.

A side benefit of Distiller is that, using a technique described in
the Distiller documentation, you can create a "wrapper" PostScript
file so you can distill the concatenation of multiple PostScript files
into a single PDF file.  We've even printed third-party PDF to a
PostScript file, concatentated that with our material, and produced a
single PDF file for the result.

I also have an impression that I can't substantiate that font
embedding of PostScript fonts works better when you distill PostScript
files.

Regards,


Tony Graham
======================================================================
Tony Graham                            mailto:tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9632
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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