Framemaker 9 won't connect to Distiller 9

[JohnD111]

I've been using FM 9 successfully with Distiller 7. I recently installed the Adobe eLearning Suite, which upgraded my Acrobat installation to version 9. FM continued to call Distiller 7, which had not been uninstalled during the Acrobat update. My IT dept. uninstalled Acrobat 9 from the eLearning suite and reinstalled Acrobat 9 Pro as a standalone program. Also deleted the directory containing Distiller 7, and a related registry key.

The first time I reopened FM 9, it reinstalled Distiller 7!

How can I get FM 9 to use Distiller 9 when I save as PDF?

Thanks, John

[Arnis Gubins]

John,

Simply starting FM will not install any version of Distiller. If you have Sundorne's SetPrint utility installed, it will set FM to use a specified Acrobat printer instance, ie. AdobePDF. This is the same name used for the printer instance in all versions of the product since Acrobat 6.

You can't mix multiple versions of an Acrobat product on the same machine. You have to make certain that the old Distiller is truly removed from the system. Your IT dept. may have to use both Adobe's CS3Clean and CS4Clean utilities after uninstalling to ensure that you've got a good stable base and then re-install. Simply deleting a few items will still leave detritus around. Acrobat hides things all over the place.

[JohnD111]

I probably should have posted this problem to the Acrobat forum, though I experienced it as a Framemaker problem. It is solved now -- as you said, Acrobat hides things all over the place.

To recap -- I installed the eLearning Suite which updated Acrobat to 9.0. After this, my Distiller connection to FM was acting strangely. I don't have the utility you mentioned.

I uninstalled and reinstalled Acrobat 9.0 (separate from eLearning Suite). After I did this, there was no Acrobat 7.0 directory or any trace of 7.0 that I know of. To my surprise, when I ran FM, a new Acrobat 7.0 directory was created, and Distiller 7.0 was reinstalled. Framemaker would only use Distiller 7, and MS Office could not access Distiller at all. I did this more than once.

The solution was to do a complete uninstall and reinstall of all Adobe CS4, eLearning, Acrobat and Framemaker products. (I also updated MS Office at the same time.) Reinstallation in a logical order made all of the problems go away, though this was a time consuming process. I guess there were various hooks left over from older installations that were not wiped out during various updates, including the first update to Acrobat 9.0. I have no idea where the files for Distiller 7.0 were copied from.

John