FrameMaker 9 Installation

Report · Jan 21, 2009

Wow - nice surprise to see FM 9 hit the streets!

1. If all we want is FM 9 and we already have Adobe Acrobat 9, during the installation when asked to install the "PDF Creation Add-On" do we install it or not install it and is the only thing really installed Acrobat Distiller?

2. Under Vista especially, getting Save As PDF to work was hopeless and frustrating - does FM 9's Save As PDF now actually work? This was my biggest complaint with getting FM 7 and FM 8 working with PDFs.

Thank you
Ken Whitaker (aka Software Maniac)

Report · Jan 21, 2009

1. I would pass. I think the Add On is just the Distiller that has always shipped, and would be less than the full version you already have.

2. I think you'd have to test. But I habitually don't use SaveAs because in the past it invoked a different work flow. Don't know if that's still the same or has changed in 9.

Art

Report · Jan 21, 2009

Ken,

The "PDF Creation Add-on" that ships with FM is effectively a crippled
version of Distiller. So if you already have Acrobat 9, just skip that
part.

Sometimes the newer FM installation doesn't always register the
pre-existing Acrobat installation and this messes up the Save As PDF
facility. Try running the Acrobat "Help > Repair Acrobat Installation"
option to get FM to properly see the Adobe PDF printer instance.

With FM9, doing a Save As PDF now allows you to preserve CMYK and spot
colours in the resulting PDF, which you won't be able to do by
printing to the AdobePDF and distilling. (However, this also results
in a more bloated PDF, as all of the linking, bookmarking, etc. also
get turned on, which are useless for print production jobs.)

Report · Feb 02, 2009

Hello Software Maniac, hello Mr. Gubins,

I have been using FM8 quite a lot, and did not ever have any difficulties with "save as PDF". What kind of difficulties did you have?

Normally, one can set whether "all named destinations" a.s.o are to be included in the PDF or not. As for FM9s CMYK: It works transparently. Everything that is TIF, JPG and BMP will be handed through as correct CMYK, as will everything that has got a "FrameMaker colour" that has been defined as CMYK.

If you experience PDF bloat, and use EPS, the reason for this might be the EPS. As far as I know, FM just hands EPS through. So if your EPS contains a lot of data, and you don´t compress it enough with your joboptions, you will get a bigger PDF.

If you have vector art with very many vectors in the EPS, this may also cause bloat, because although the vector art is scalable without quality loss, there are a lot of objects in the vector file to preserve.

Hope this helps.
With kind regards,
Franz.
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