What the @$% -at- $ is wrong with FM7 and printing to Distiller???

["Chuck Martin" <cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com>]

Thanks to the advice here on this list, I finally got this to work.
2 days ago. I did something along the lines of opening each file, closing
it,
then setting the Remember Missing Fonts option to on. (I dont' remember the
exact order.) Then, printing the book to Distiller worked! Yay.

Yesterday (late), after a day of editing, I go to print the book again. Uh
oh, I notice
something wrong right off: Distilller is no longer the printer selected.
It's the PostScript printer I've installed. So I set the printer to
Distiller, andI get a printer error almost as soon as I click to save the
PDF file. The print driver hangs and I have to cancel the print job (which
takes quite some time). FM itself hangs intil the print job is canceled.
When the print job finally cancels, I get an extremely helpful message
fromFM itself: "An error occurred when printing." Well Duh.

I am at my wits end. With all the problems Word has, especially dealing with
long documetns, I have never run tino so many problems printing or creating
PDF files. I can't believe that Adobe doens't have the engineering know how
to make these issues (many of which seem to be related to fonts) go away.

There is no reason why a company that makes both products shouldn't have the
programming and QA resources to make them work smoothly together. There is
absolutely no excuse why the programs can't be engineered to compensate for
minor system quirks and handle them gracefully and still produce good
output.

And to make it worse, there are all these little tips and workarounds
floating about, but as in the old days of DOS, the "in crowd" was privy to
the dark secrets, and they were doled out sparingly. This is the type of
user experience you get when, as Alan Cooper said, "The Inmates Are Rinnung
the Asylum." In this case, a product grown from the inner sanctum of Unix.

OK, rant over. Now can someone tell me what the heck is going on with this
thing?

Oh yeah, latest patch version of 7.0/Win running on a WinXP Home machine
with more than enough memory and disk space. Latest patches of both FM and
Acrobat.



-- 
--
"I don't entirely understand it but it is true: Highly skilled carpenters
don't get insulted when told they are not architects, but highly skilled
programmers do get insulted when told they are not UI designers."
     - anonymous programmer quoted in "GUI Bloopers"

Chuck Martin
User Assistance & Experience Engineer
twriter "at" sonic "dot" net      www.writeforyou.com



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