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A
Anonymous
March 25, 2014
Question

Stopping a PDF-making process

  • March 25, 2014
  • 1 reply
  • 432 views

In FM12, I sometimes start a "Save as PDF" process, then realize I haven't done one tiny thing that needs doing. If this book is big (31 .fm files in my case with lots of drawings and pictures imported by reference) this can take a long time on my poor laptop. I would like to be able to say "Wait! Stop!" to the PDF-making process. Is there a way to do this short of closing FM?

Steve

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1 reply

Bob_Niland
Community Expert
Bob_NilandCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 27, 2014

Unless someone comes up with something cleaner ...

  1. Run a trial large Save-as-PDF with Windows TaskManager (TM)* open, and see what processes are spawned.
    (FM doesn't do its own PDF rendering. It uses external processes for that.)
  2. On FM9/Win64, I see:
    acrodist.exe
    splwow64.exe
    Using TM to end process "acrodist" doesn't seem to do anything immediately. Using it to kill "splwow64" promptly returns control to FM.
  3. In TM, right-click on the process to be killed. Select "End Process".
  4. Clean up all the temporary/log files that will be lying around.

The process names may be different on 32-bit Windows, as it probably doesn't need to rely on splwow64. They may also be different on FM versions after 9, as Adobe may have implemented native 64-bit code. You might need to kill the distiller process in that case. The process names will be different on legacy Unix and Mac. On Unix, the thing to kill is "fmnorm" as I recall, having needed to do that once or twice. On Windows, you may need to re-start FM in any case to get it print again.

______

* Right click on blank region of lower Windows taskbar. Select "Start Task Manager".

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