Using Adobe Distiller with PE question

[byork]

I am wondering if anyone out there is using Adobe Distiller with PE. Also would be curious of what the advantages or disadvantages are.



Any input would be great.



Thanks in advance.

[ebenton]

I have no experience with using Distiller with PE. However, I do
believe that Distiller makes better-quality PDF than other PDF-creation
engines.

[jsillari]

Also, despite best efforts, Distiller’s output file size is still smaller
than the built-in solution.



John Sillari
Chief Technologist
Technical Services Division
Dayton T. Brown, Inc.

_____

[ptc-953926]

We've had good experience recently with direct-to-PDF after years of
using Distiller with PE. The disadvantage of Distiller, of course, is
another costly license. The big advantage of direct-to-PDF is its
speed. We cannot recommend direct-to-PDF, however, prior to PE 5.3
patch M020 (numerous issues with graphics and incapable of generating
correct traditional Chinese). We are now able to completely abandon
Distiller with equivalent quality of PDFs.



Dave Hintz

Siemens

[melissa.kauma]

We use distiller with PE to produce PDF files and also use the distiller print driver on PE in order to generate postscript files to send to printers. The main reason we started using distiller is because we had issues with postscript files generated using a default printer driver that was not generic. Using a non-distiller print driver as the default PE print driver caused the postscript files to contain commands that would not work on some of our printers. Using the distiller print driver generates post script files that are generic enough to be used on any printer. As far as the PDF files go I have not noticed any quality changes since switching to distiller, however, I believe that the PDF file size is slightly smaller.

Melissa

[ClayHelberg]

One potential advantage of using Adobe vs. direct-to-PDF, at least for
big installations: with Adobe's LifeCycle server, you can configure it
to automatically generate PDF files with commenting enabled, which lets
anyone with the free Reader software add comments to the PDF's. (Without
this enabled, only users with a paid version of Acrobat can add
comments.) AFAIK, this is the only way to enable commenting by default
in your PDF files*. You can't do it with any desktop version of
Distiller, and you can't do it with any non-Adobe product--including
PE's direct-to-PDF feature.



--Clay



* You can enable this with Acrobat Professional (desktop) on a
file-by-file basis, but it's a manual process that must be applied to
each and every PDF you want to enable for commenting.