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> I want to experiment with printing from Word to a PS file and then creating
> a PDF with Acrobat, but I have a non-PS printer, and I can't figure out
> which file to download from the HP website. I just find it incredibly
> confusing. Can anyone point me to a good plain vanilla PS file? Thanks.
First, you should note that HP does not provide true PostScript drivers, in
the sense that they do not license PostScript from Adobe. This seems to
work fine for their own printers, but can cause some obscure compatibility
issues with anything that expects "true" PostScript, like Adobe Acrobat.
Second, the standard installation script for all versions of Adobe Acrobat
installs a virtual printer called "Adobe PDF" (for Acrobat 6.0 or later--
earlier versions used different names), whihc is precisely the driver you
should use to create PostScript files that you will then distill to PDF.
In fact, if your installation completed correctly, all you really need to do
to create a PDF from any application is to print to that "Adobe PDF" virtual
printer; you shouldn't need to do the two-step process (print to PS, then
distill to PDF) at all. When you print to the Adobe PDF printer, you
should be prompted for a name and location for the resulting PDF, and the
printer driver should sent the PostScript directly to the Distiller without
any user intervention.
But when making a PDF from Word, the preferred method is to use the
"Convert to Adobe PDF" button in the PDFMaker toolbar that the Acrobat
installation normally adds to all MS Ofiice applications that it finds on
your system when you install Acrobat. That method preserves the
hyperlinks for entries in Word's TOC and index and also to URLs (without
relying on Adobe Reader to recognize the syntax of URLs in the final PDF).
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