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> Thanks Peter. I consider it real bad manners for a program, trial or
> not, to remove an existing program unasked and leave me without it. It's
> especially bad from a big and presumably professional outfit like Adobe.
> If Adobe had a notice somewhere telling me that their FrameMaker 10
> trial would remove my old version of Acrobat and install an inoperable
> Acrobat version instead, I missed it.
I just want to clarify a couple of points.
First, what FrameMaker 10 installs is not "an inoperable Acrobat version". What it does install is a fully functional but "headless" version of Acrobat Distiller (full Distiller functionality but with no user interface). Every version of FrameMaker since 5.5 has included a headless Distiller in order to be able to produce PDFs from FrameMaker files and books.
Second, in every FrameMaker installer I've used (from 5.5.6 to 9.0), the FrameMaker installer calls a secondary installer that installs the headless Distiller and creates a PDF virtual printer instance, and the user is prompted before that sub-installer kicks off. As Peter explained, it is not possible to have more than one instance of Distiller installed on the same computer (this is because of the way Distiller has to hook into the Windows printer driver), so once you tell the installer to proceed with the Adobe PDF printer installation, you have effectively told the program to uninstall any older version of Distiller.
The real problem is that it is hard to explain all the ramifications of installing the Adobe PDF printer in an installer dialog box, and it just underlines Peter's advice about not installing evaluation software on a production machine. This is particularly true if the evaluation software is a newer version of a tool you already have installed, and even more so if it is a tool you use to get your job done.
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