Acrobat 9 seems incompatible with Snow Leopard

Report · Aug 27, 2009

Got my Snow Leopard late this afternoon and have had great luck with it so far (did an upgrade, not a clean install)...except for Acrobat 9. Ugh! Attempting to print to PDF via Adobe PDF 9.0 printer/driver causes the printer/driver to fire up and the progress windows indicates that distiller launches, but after that, the prompt for where to save the PDF to never appears and the file in the print queue disappears. Checking the log file shows quite a few errors are happening:

E [25/Aug/2009:18:35:44 -0500] Unable to execute /usr/libexec/cups/backend/pdf900: No such file or directory
E [25/Aug/2009:18:35:44 -0500] [Job 4] Stopping job because the sheduler could not execute the backend.
E [25/Aug/2009:18:37:12 -0500] Unable to execute /usr/libexec/cups/backend/pdf900: No such file or directory
E [25/Aug/2009:18:37:12 -0500] [Job 5] Stopping job because the sheduler could not execute the backend.
E [25/Aug/2009:21:49:33 -0500] Unable to update IPP DNS-SD record for AdobePDF9 - -65549
E [25/Aug/2009:21:49:33 -0500] Unable to update IPP DNS-SD record for AdobePDF9 - -65549
E [27/Aug/2009:18:35:41 -0500] [Job 7] Job aborted because the destination printer/class has gone away.
E [27/Aug/2009:18:45:43 -0500] Unable to execute /usr/libexec/cups/backend/pdf900: No such file or directory
E [27/Aug/2009:18:45:43 -0500] [Job 9] Stopping job because the sheduler could not execute the backend.
E [27/Aug/2009:19:38:42 -0500] cupsdAuthorize: pam_authenticate() returned 9 (authentication error)!
E [27/Aug/2009:21:16:59 -0500] Unable to execute /usr/libexec/cups/backend/pdf900: No such file or directory
E [27/Aug/2009:21:16:59 -0500] [Job 19] Stopping job because the sheduler could not execute the backend.

I've done a full uninstall and cleaned out all files, then reinstalled. I did the old repair/restore trick from the Help menu. I even tried printing to PDF after each patch/upgrade all the way to the latest version. No luck at all. And yes, all other CS4 apps I have work fine.

Any suggestions?

Report · Sep 01, 2009

No luck for me after installing Rosetta.

Report · Sep 01, 2009

So, I've been looking into all the things people have been saying and testing it myself. Apparently, Rosetta at least allows the "Save as Adobe PDF" to run some of the time. However, Adobe does need to push out an updated workflow for this process to be working all the time. One thing I observed, however, is that when I had the box checked for open with Rosetta, "Save as Adobe PDF" completely crashed. I would try it without having that box checked but with Rosetta installed. There doesn't seem to be an exact science in fixing this problem, but at least I have been able to use the function with a little tinkering.

Sorry to get everyone's hopes up.

Report · Sep 01, 2009

I can confirm that, in my case, I have the Open with Rosetta box unchecked in the Get Info window. Since mine is working, this might suggest that this box needs to be unchecked. The Get Info window also indicates that the app IS Universal, even though, if you open the app in Automator all you will see is an action that reads:

The action “Save as Adobe PDF” could not be loaded because it is not Universal.

Please ask the developer for a Universal version of the action.

To Steve above, this is the only other thing I can suggest - to check that the Open with Rosetta box is unchecked and try once more. Other than that, then we need to rely on Adobe to issue a fix...

Report · Sep 01, 2009

I installed Snow Leopard on an older Intel Laptop. I did install Rosetta since I still use many older apps. I fixed permissions, I deleted the Adobe PDF printer and fixed the installation of Acrobat. In my limited testing I've had no issues creating pdfs or opening them in Acrobat (both through the file-open and double clicking on a pdf file). I will do more testing tonight.

Report · Sep 01, 2009

I had a bit more time to play. I've tried several setting from different apps with no issue.

Report · Sep 04, 2009

I've tried all of the suggestions listed here. The automator is listed as being "Universal" on my system, so there is no checkbox to launch it with Rosetta in the Get Info... box. I've reinstalled the workflow repeatedly in the pdf print workflow menu, and I've repeatedly repaired the Acrobat Pro installation. Result: Every time I try to "Save as Acrobat PDF" the workflow crashes. Not once have I gotten it to run.

This is a disaster; I hope that Adobe will push out a fix on this soon.

As a last point, given that this workflow is diasabled within Acrobat Pro, so in other words you can't print a displayed pdf to make a new pdf file, how is one supposed to "redistill" a pdf file. In my work, this has been the only way to consolidate redundant embedded font subsets in order to get a small pdf that can be printed sucessfully on a postscript printer with a standard amount of memory.

Report · Sep 04, 2009

As a last point, given that this workflow is diasabled within Acrobat Pro, so in other words you can't print a displayed pdf to make a new pdf file, how is one supposed to "redistill" a pdf file. In my work, this has been the only way to consolidate redundant embedded font subsets in order to get a small pdf that can be printed sucessfully on a postscript printer with a standard amount of memory.

Adobe has been cautioning against redistiling pdfs for years. You can save a pdf as a postscript file, then re-distill using Distiller. However, that is not the way to consolidate embedded fonts. Remove them with the pdf optimizer then use pre-flight to re-embed the fonts once per file (assuming you have the fonts on your system).

Report · Sep 04, 2009

MikeKazlow wrote:
Adobe has been cautioning against redistiling pdfs for years.

This makes it even more of a surprise that, when running Save as Adobe PDF through Automator, the action will only operate on PDF files.

Report · Sep 05, 2009

telecommunicate,

Adobe may be doing what they have to in the short term to give users a solution that works even if it is not the best way to go. Time will tell if they will be able to create a newer and better pdf printer driver that will be compatible with OS X.6 when Acrobat 10 is released.

Report · Sep 06, 2009

Yes, but will I have to pay another £172 to upgrade to Acrobat 10 just to be able to do something that my present Acrobat 9 should be able to do? The average user like me is not really bothered whether the application works in a roundabout way or whether it works in a 'newer or better' manner. We just want it to work!

If it was some peripheral feature that was malfunctioning I could live with it but good pdf output is the main reason for having Acrobat. Without it the whole app. is a waste of time and money.

Report · Sep 06, 2009

The Acrobat application works fine as far as I can tell in Snow Leopard. Distiller works fine in Snow Leopard. That to me is the largest part of Acrobat on the Mac. You can manually create postscript files and distill them in Acrobat with no issue. That is the way I did it at the beginning of time. For years, I still did that in FrameMaker on both Mac and Windows. It works without fail. Apple changed the way their operating system works. That is not Adobe's fault. I hope it works better in Acrobat 10, but it by no means a deal breaker. You can still create quality pdfs using Adobe technology in Snow Leopard with Acrobat 9. That is the important thing. Acrobat came out one year ago. It is likely Acrobat 10 will be out within a year. That should give Apple and Adobe time to put things right. Am I disappointed, sure. Am I surprised, no. Have I updated my main machine to use Snow Leopard yet, not on your life. I need to evaluate the changes and how they affect my machines and my workflow. When all works within tolerable conditions, I'll upgrade them and not a moment sooner. The problem is for people who get new machines that ship only with 10.6. Older machines are still available. If your forced to work in Snow Leopard, Acrobat still works reasonably well. That is the good news.

Report · Sep 06, 2009

My trouble is that if I pay good money for something I expect it to work, straight off. I must have wasted six hours faffing about with Acrobat, forums, updates and goodness knows what else. Before I bought Acrobat 9 I asked the dealer whether it would work with Snow Leopard and was assured that Apple and Adobe worked closely together to ensure that their products were compatible. Total rubbish! They rely on mugs like me to do their testing for them at no expense.

Anyway I have finally managed to produce a pdf file and sent it off. Let's hope it works next time I need it.

Report · Sep 12, 2009

Well, if you will tell me how to directly convert a Pages file via Distiller, I'll be happy. When I try to do that, Distiller rejects the file.

Report · Sep 12, 2009

Having thought about this disaster over the last few days, and having tried unsuccessfully to get the Adobe PDF workflow gadget to work without crashing, not once, it occurs to me that any apologies for Adobe here are out of place. Consider that the Save As PDF... button provided by Snow Leopard's print dialog box works just fine, and as far I as know this button pipes the print job through a version of Distiller licensed from Adobe.

The issue here is really that Adobe no longer really wants to support fully the Mac OS X platform. It is a business decision, just like the one they made when they quit providing FrameMaker on the Macintosh.

Well, having piped a lot of my software-purchasing resources in the past through Adobe, and having not been satisfied with the support of the existing features on which I depend and have invested time in learning and implementation, I've rather had enough of this. And I've certainly had enough of hearing about how I should buy Acrobat 10 since this will relevate the problem. That's a business decision I'm not going to make.

Report · Sep 12, 2009

Problematically, the "Save as Adobe PDF" button does NOT work universally. I'd be happy with that if it did, even if a little disgruntled about losing the ease of just selecting a printer.

I can't get it to work in any manner whatsoever.

(I, too, am annoyed with the Framemaker business.)

Problem for me, though, is that I am in the publishing business and my printers are adamant about wanting *ADOBE* pdfs, not 3rd party pdfs, and that is driving me bonkers.

I literally cannot conduct my business without Adobe PDF files!

Report · Sep 12, 2009

As I am the one who originally started this thread, I thought I would give everyone an update after some brief experimentation today. My first thought was to check and see if Rosetta was actually installed. And to my surprise, it was not. I'm guessing I simply overlooked the option to install Rosetta during my 10.6 upgrade. So, I installed Rosetta off the 10.6 disc using the Optional Installs pkg.

Next, as others have suggested, I made sure the "Save as Adobe PDF" workflow in the PDF Services folder was checked to launch using Rosetta. Then I fired up TextEdit to run a test. Eureka!, I was able to produce my first PDF using the "Save as Adobe PDF" function....

BUT! It was my first and last succesfull PDF. Subsequent attempts all end with the workflow crashing just as it did without Rosetta being installed. How's that for strange behavior!?

Truth be told, the only reason I ever used Adobe's "Save as Adobe PDF" function was that it produced much smaller file sizes than OS X's native PDF generation feature. Since the upgrade to 10.6, I'm come to accept using this native process. It seems to be doing a pretty good job for me so far. I do wish the "Save as Adobe PDF" function was working so I could compare its file size to the native process.

So, I thought I had found a fix, but alas, no such luck today. The hunt continues!

Report · Sep 13, 2009

You can still reduce PDF sizes by opening Acrobat and choose Optimizer from advanced menu. And once you have saved a PDF to use as a Form you should be able to use Forms Manager to add form elements.

Report · Sep 15, 2009

Just to confirm what everyone already knows, the 10.6.1 update doesn't do anything to help this situation. I think I've got about a 50% success rate with the Save as Adobe PDF option. In fact, I just tried it on a webpage and had it fail the first time, but work the second time (with absolutely nothing changed).

Report · Sep 18, 2009

I was having the same problem as others. I couldn't even export to pdf from within InDesign. I suddenly got the idea to check FontBook; I resolved all font conflicts, and now Acrobat pdf functionality is fully restored.

Report · Sep 23, 2009

Just for the benefit of the original poster (and others who are suffering with this problem):

I went ahead and developed a CUPS (Mac print server) backend which drops Postscript files off in a directory structure. It then either signals Distiller to pick them up, or Distiller can be set to sweep the directory every so often and convert them to PDF. I might get rid of the signal because I seem to keep introducing unnecessary bugs when I use it.

The good news is that it works almost identically to the lost functionality. The only difference is that the landing directory of the PDF is predefined, and there's no way to change it right now. The bad news is that the first version I wrote was offensively bad code and required a ton of tiny mods at the command line to make it work. So I'm quickly rewriting it in C++, and I'll package it in .pkg format so it's easy to get working. Should only take me another day or so.

FYI, what I used the Adobe PDF printer for was to print from VMware Fusion and from Crossover Office, neither of which have any visibility whatsoever to the Automator Workflows. I'm only going to the trouble of coding a fix for Adobe's problem because they caught me in the middle of a project where I REALLY need to be able to output to Adobe PDF from a Windows app, and I'm not about to spring for a second Windows copy of Acrobat. Maybe they'll find it in their hearts to give me a nifty present if this fix gets people off their backs.

Report · Sep 12, 2009

Michael,

The problem is, the so-called solution doesn't work for many of us! It's not a solution if it doesn't work, even as a workaround.

Report · Sep 12, 2009

Is it possible that Distiller still has to be run in Rosetta. I know in in Acrobat 6 Distiller never was convereted you still had to run it on a 68030 Processor. It was not till 7 that Distiller was full PowerPC. For some reason Distiller seems to be the complicated to convert.

Report · Sep 12, 2009

Distiller seems to run, and it has had no problems prior to my Snow Leopard upgrade. I just tried to create a PDF directly from Distiller, with a new PSD file I just created in Photoshop CS3.

It ran and failed. Here is the log file created:

%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: 8BPS ]%%

%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%

%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Report · Sep 01, 2009

The Open in Rosetta checkbox is NOT checked. It still fails.

Now, this is the inconsistency: I have the same setup on another MacBook Pro, and it IS working there.

Report · Sep 01, 2009

Steve Werner wrote:
The Open in Rosetta checkbox is NOT checked. It still fails.
Now, this is the inconsistency: I have the same setup on another MacBook Pro, and it IS working there.

Ah .. by chance is there more than one user account on the machine? If so, does it have admin permissions?

Also, you may want to try creating a brand new user .. give full admin permissions .. and try from there .. it could be a permissions issue, corrupt user setting, or maybe a conflict with something else.

Worth a shot anyways.

Had a similar problem with CS3 on one of my client's Macs just a few months ago .. on that one wound up uninstalling all of CS3, creating a new user account, and installing CS3 from there. From that point on, all is well.