FM10/Acrobat Pro 9 not honoring joboptions

[former Cory R. Carpenter]

We've recently started transitioning from FrameMaker 9 to 10, and have retained Acrobat 9 Pro Extended rather than moving to Acrobat X. On the surface, Save As PDF works fine, however we have a need to specify a custom .joboptions file for Distiller in order to enforce PDF version 1.4 (Acrobat 4.x) compatibily because many of our customers use very old versions of AcroRead.

Late last week one of our writers noticed that FM10 Save As PDF through Distiller 9 is producing PDF Version 1.6 (Acrobat 7.x) files. I've been beating my head against this all week to no avail: If I produce PDF from FM9 with Save As PDF, I get v1.4 PDF; if I use FM10, I get v1.6. I can print from FM10 to the Adobe PDF printer and get v1.3; I can drag a PostScript file from FM10 into Distiller and get v1.3 PDF. I can even grab the .tps file produced by FM10 Save As PDF and get v1.3 PDF by running it through Distiller 9... . In one experiment I specified a given font as "always embed" in the .joboptions, and it was not embedded.  The .joboptions just seems to be ignored for some reason.

I've tried deleting the Adobe PDF printer instance and doing a "repair" on Acrobat 9, to no avail.

Anyone know whether something's changed between FM9 and 10? It just seems as though something different is going on under the covers that's preventing Distiller from honoring our .joboptions file. The only theory that I have left is that FM10 has some hardcoded override in its call to Distiller... .

-Cory R. Carpenter

[Van Kurtz]

I do not know what FrameMaker does when one selects Save as PDF. I would not know how to set the joboptions using that route.

BUT one can select the joboptions when PRINTING to the Adobe PDF printer. Be sure to do two things: in the print dialog, click the Setup button (next to the name of the printer, Adobe PDF) and select the joboptions file for the printer; then click PDF Setup, and in that dialog select the joboptions in the Settings tag.

[former Cory R. Carpenter]

As I mentioned in the orginal post, printing to Adobe PDF works as expected, as does running the temporary PostScript file through Distiller manually.  It's only Save As PDF that displays this problem.  (When you have Distiller installed, Save As PDF creates a temporary PostScript -- .tps -- file and hands it to Distiller.)

Unfortunately, part of our custom infrastructure depends on the FDK FA_Note_PreDistill notification, so printing to Adobe PDF is not sufficient to our needs.

An additional data point: The problem persists with Distiller X, further suggesting that the problem lies with FrameMaker 10.

-Cory R. Carpenter

[Van Kurtz]

I know nothing about the FDK and what you need it to do, so this may not help.

Have you tried starting Distiller and selecting the joboptions there. Once the joboptions are selected, leave Distiller running. Then try saving the Frame file as PDF. In the distant past, this was the only way of setting Distiller joboptions. Maybe the process will not create a new instance of Distiller but use the one running. Of course, this will not work if the joboptions have to change for each PDF created.

[former Cory R. Carpenter]

Good thought, but FM10 opens a new instance of Distiller... .

[Bob_Niland]

> Unfortunately, part of our custom infrastructure depends on the FDK FA_Note_PreDistill notification, so printing to Adobe PDF is not sufficient to our needs.

So what does that FDK do? If it is inserting prolog, job ticket or attachments that survive into the Ps data stream, you ought to be able to print to file (.ps), then separately Distill.

We routinely print-to-Ps and Distill separately for several reasons, one of which is that it provides full control via Distiller settings.

[former Cory R. Carpenter]

Error7103: This FDK plugin puts a PostScript frame in the source to augment PDF page-numbering display, and also corrects named destination markers.  We could print to PS and distill, alternatively we can Save As PDF and optimize to PDF 1.4 in Acrobat, but each of these mean extra steps for our writers... .

[former Cory R. Carpenter · Accepted solution]

Bingo!

Replacing AdobeFrameMaker10\fminit\fmpdfreflow.dll with the version from FrameMaker 9 makes the problem go away.  I don't yet know what other problems it might cause though... .

-Cory R. Carpenter

[former Cory R. Carpenter]

In case someone should stumble across this discussion, see also http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1002417?tstart=0 for related problems.

By the way, the problem also exists in FM11, and you can work around it by commenting out fmpdfreflow.dll in your maker.ini file.  Again, I have no idea whether doing so might cause problems elsewhere.

[Arnis Gubins]

Cory,

You might want to peruse this reply: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4677347#4677347

There are some plug-ins in the maker.ini that you can comment out if you don't want FM to any post-processing of the Distiller created PDFs. The fmpdfreflow.dll is for Accessibility features in PDFs, so if you don't need these, you can comment it out. This should also speed up your PDF creation when using SaveAsPDF.

[former Cory R. Carpenter]

Thanks Arnis, that's helpful as we're not explicitly concerned with accessibility features at this time.

Any idea whether the various plugins are documented somewhere available to mere mortals?  It could be helpful to know exactly which features are affected... .

[Arnis Gubins]

Unfortunately, there have been no updates to the info (maker.ini) contents since FM7.2 and even then, many items were just mentioned, but had no details at all. Klaus Daube has compiled some more info on the later versions of maker.ini and newer configuration files that might help customize an installation. See the info available at:

http://daube.ch/docu/fmaker68.html

http://daube.ch/docu/files/etb-customising-fm.pdf