Framemaker Created PS files - Distiller crashing

[CAIDave]

I have posted this in the Acrobat forum also. They suggested that I post itover here also.

We have a directory with 173 postscript files in it. These postscript files were created with Framemaker 7.2. Distiller is set to watch the folder and starts distilling.

Distiller will process a number of files and then crash. The message is "Acrobat Distiller has encountered a problem and needs to close". Distiller is then manually restarted and process some more files and then crashes again. Doing this enough times, it will successfully distill all of the files in the directory.

It does not appear to be related to any file (because there are no error messages in the distiller status window and the "Last Page" line shows up). It appears to occur when the disilling of a file has completed (around the time it copies the file to the out folder.). No error messages are generated in any log files.

All files around where the error occurs can be distilled singly without error.

Acrobat 8 was uninstalled and reinstalled with no change. Another different computer was used with the same result.

I have opened up an Adobe tech support case. But it would be extremely helpful to have some assitance from the many experts ins in this forum.
Tech support recently responded with:

"For the problem you are having, it sounds like Distiller is running out
of memory to be used to convert the postscript files. Quite a bit of
the conversion process happens in the RAM and temporary files folder, so
while you might have a large Hard drive, the program itself will crash
out if given too much work to do at once."

I can get it to occur with 10 files in a directory and have distilled these quantities of files for the last years using distiller 4,5,6 and 7. Is this a reasonable explanation?

They also responded with:

"Older versions of Framemaker it was recommended to go to postscript first and then turn the files to PDF. Framemaker 7.0 and higher though, the conversion directly to PDF is much more stable and now is the recommended work flow for getting your FM files into PDF format."

Is this indeed the offical position now? I have looked in the FAQs for this forum and haven't seen this.

I apologize for the length of this posting.

[Art Campbell]

One important piece of information is what printer driver you're using to create the PostScript files. If you're using Acrobat as the printer driver, why not just create the PDFs directly by printing to the Acrobat printer?

And... Acrobat 8 has been patched a couple of times. You're up to date with those?

Art

[Arnis Gubins]

"Framemaker 7.0 and higher though, the conversion directly to PDF is
much more stable and now is the recommended work flow for getting your
FM files into PDF format."

This is not a correct statement. FM still does not directly create
PDFs (as say InDesign does), but simply fires off a background process
that prints to a temporary postscript file, then runs Distiller using
the specified joboptions file, and finally deletes the temporary
postscript file and logfile. So it's still effectively the same as
printing to a postscript from FM (using the Adobe PDF printer
instance) and manually distilling to PDF.

I'd look at your file space available on the drive and how much memory
you have on your computer as one possible culprit. Also, how do you
manage to accumulate that many files in a watched folder before
Distiller starts processing them? It should be picking up the files as
soon as they enter.

[CAIDave]

Art

Yes this occurs when using the Adobe PDF printer.

There is not a simple answer to your question about why not use the Adobe PDF printer. We create files that have a 10 year life. For 7 of that 10 years we have to update these files on a frequent basis and we can not inadvertantly change any formatting (e.g. move a word from one line to the next because we changed our workflow). To accomplish this we tightly control the configuration of everything used in the work flow. We use a Framemaker plug-in to actually cause Framemaker to create the PS files (along with other functionality such as parsing the documents, extracting meta data to a data base). It is a possibility to use the PDF Printer but it will take time to modify and extensively test the change.

If this is going to be the preferred method that has the highest likely hood of being supported for the next 10 years, then we can start the process of modifying the work flow. We have felt for many years that using a watched folder for distiller had the highest likely hood of being support for long periods of time.

Thanks

[CAIDave]

Arnis

Thanks for the thoughts. We will only change our workflow after some thorough investigation. Changes to our workflow are very big deals and making mistakes is expensive.

The Adobe tech support staff is also suggesting resource limitations. I am not sure where to start looking. The computer has 30GB free onb the hard drive. It has 2 GB of RAM and is only using about 700 MB when this occurs.

Interestingly we have always "watched the folders" while the PS files were being created. But we recently have started running into printer errors from Framemaker that looks like a conflict with distiller.

In either case (waiting to distill until done or distill as PS is created) distiller still crashes. We have also created a directory that contains 10 PS files. This will also crash distiller 9 out of 10 times.

One of the things we started looking at today was to turn off the "create PDF tags" in the Framemaker PDF setup. We created the PS files again. Distiller still crashed. The "create tags feature" is really a great feature that seems to work very well. We have to be Section 508 compliant.

Is it possible that we will be forced to change our workflow to make this work? It has always (since Acrobat 4) seemed that using distiller and watched folders was the most reliable preferred approach for distilling that was most likely to be supported in future releases. Other methods seem to be more likely to change in the future.

Thanks

[Arnis Gubins]

David,

Have you done any configuration changes to the Adobe PDF printer
instance or are you using it "as is" from the original install? Some
of the default settings may not be optimal.

Adobe's Dov Isaacs has some presentations posted in various sections
of these Forums about Reliable PDF Print creation workflows. There are
some tips for proper printer instance configuration and Distiller
joboptions to use. One of the more recent (2006) presentation papers
is available here:

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc0394b

Note: it's a very big download (130Mb)

[tlmurray23]

The computer doing the distilling: what else is it doing? It sounds to me like it simply runs out of resources. And by the way, the regular version of Distiller itself is not licensed for a server environment.

[CAIDave]

Tim

I have started running it without anything else running and it still crashes. I don't know what kind of resources it would run out of. We have run this on three different computers and the same thing occurs on all three.

What kind of resources does distiller possibly run out of? The normal machine that this is run on is a new 2GB Core 2 duo with 53GB free space. The PS files are actually stored on a server (we do all work there so that files get backed up - not sharing distiller - workstations aren't backed up).

I watched the task manager | performance the other day while it was crashing and the amount of memory being used didn't vary much. I guess it is possible that task manager doesn't have the time resolution to see a quick spike but there is 1 GB of available physical memory.

I am going to try to repeat this problem creating the PS files with Framemaker 8.0.2.

Especially confusing is that distiller 7.0 distills these files with no problems. SO it was a shock when 8.0 started crashing.

Thanks

[David_Crowe]

Is there a possibility that the "flow" across the network where the PS files are is not stable enough for Distiller working locally?

Just a thought. We are also having problems with FrameMaker 8/Acrobat 8 combinations in variable workflows on 3 workstations. My solution for the moment has been to abandon Distiller and use the open source PDFCreator.

[CAIDave]

David

I think the network is stable. One of our test cases is a standalone computer also. The problem occurs on this computer also.

Interestingly, we have another task going to look at upgrading some of our work to Framemaker 8. This testing was being performed on a Vista computer. This computer is not a precisely controlled configured (not configured for publishing, only used for development). When we recreate the PS files using Framemaker 8 on the Vista platform, Distiller 8 doesn't crash.

This was an unrelated activity and there may be a lot of different variables. It is not clear which change (framemaker 8, vista, fonts,etc) may have eliminated the problem because that wasn't the purpose of the testing.

We only have a limited supply of workstations to play with. And the workstations that we do have are used for other purposes. So it is difficult to get the configurations that we need to test.

The files that we have been distilling are different from our historical source files in two primary ways. We have started using OpenType fonts and we are using tagging to be section 508 compliance. Distiller 7 doesn't have a problem with these files.

We have also used distiller 8 to distiller our historical (5 year old) source files that use Type 1 fonts with "tagging" turned off. Distiller 8 crashes on these files also. Distiller 6 and 7 have never crashed on these files.

I wish it was an realistic option to switch tools, but we are under some tight time constraints that won't allow us to modify our work flow that much (because we can stay with distiller 7 if needed). It is a long range option, but we have to select a solution that has the best chance of being around and supported for at least 7 years. Changing our workflow is a very big deal that we do very cautiously. That is why we stay with the Adobe products.

Thanks for you input.

[David_Crowe]

I think your mention of "a lot of different variables" is significant.

To name only a few obvious ones that we have to deal with: there is the Distiller packaged with FrameMaker as against that in the full Acrobat product; the order in which programs are installed; the order in which updates are installed; different PostScript drivers installed by our network managers for a variety of printers, plus a centralised (non-Adobe) PDF production tool ... and that's before we get on to fonts, the options within FrameMaker under "Generate Acrobat data", the options within Distiller, etc., etc.

Like you, our workstations are not used exclusively for FrameMaker/PDF production. It's not practical to control the environment strictly, and life is too short to carry out extensive "does this work?" tests.

One colleague uninstalled and then reinstalled Acrobat 8, to make sure it was the last tool put in place. It worked, for about a week. Then something changed (what?), and it's back to crashing Distiller. Today she installed PDF Creator.

I am just happy to find a working solution, and will stick with it until it fails. Luckily almost all our PDF production is on a one-off basis.

I hope you find a work-around for your problem. Sorry I wasn't much help, but I couldn't resist expressing some of the frustration we are feeling.