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When Acrobat is installed, you have the option of selecting PDFWriter or
PDFMaker. PDFWriter is a lightweight tool that, as you note, gives you
no control, but it does some things quickly and easily. PDFMaker (which
used the Distiller printer by default) is much more powerful and is
really the only choice if you are going to send the PDF to, say, a
commercial printer for production (not your situation, of course).
I'd recommend you stay with PDFMaker and Distiller. PDFWriter is
generally considered obsolete and is not really supported anymore.
With regard to the size issue, you can control that in the PDFMaker
dialog. The large size results from Acrobat's storing document structure
information and other Word-related data to enable the export of good RTF
from the PDF file. If you change the default setting so that information
is not retained, the PDF will be much smaller. You can also control the
compression settings for graphics, in which case you can trade off image
quality for file size.
Spend some time with the PDFMaker controls, so that you understand all
the options you have available. Choose default settings that work for
you (they will be persistent--you don't have to keep fiddling with
them), and I think you'll come to like the improved results.
Dick
> I have Adobe Acrobat 3.0 at work on a Pentium III running Windows 98.
> In MS Word 2000, I have an option to "Create Adobe PDF..." on my File
> menu. I click that (no options come up) and in 10 seconds or so I have
> a PDF version that comes up in Adobe. I also had the same option in
> Word 97. Last year I loaded what I thought was Adobe 5.0 at a previous
> job and had the same menu selection with Word 97. I never had any
> options to select from with either of these programs. Acrobat PDFWriter
> 3.0 is listed as an available printer in my printer options menu, and I
> select that when creating my newsletter so I know how the pages will
> look before I convert the Word document.
>
> I loaded Adobe Acrobat 5.0 on my Pentium laptop at home (Windows 95b)
> with Word 2000, and I have all these funky conversion options available
> under a button on the toolbar. There is no simple "Create Adobe PDF..."
> on my File menu. And my printer menu lists Adobe Distiller rather than
> Acrobat PDFWriter (5.0). It takes 2 to 3 minutes to convert a simple
> 8-page newsletter to PDF and the file is larger in PDF than Word rather
> than smaller as before. Is there a way to get that simple "Create Adobe
> PDF..." option rather than go through the long version of where it
> looks for headlines to convert to bookmarks, etc., etc.?
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