Acrobat 6 Distiller "Can't Initialize PDFLib"

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
This has got to be one of the strangest upgrades I have ever used. Finally Distiller 6 is OS X native, but not without its problems.



Everything seems to work okay in administrator mode, but for any other users created on the computer, I get the error in the subject line.



Obviously, the first thing I thought about was permissions, so I made all folders and files related to Distiller 6 drwxrwx, and it did work for a while, but would fail after a few weeks.



Doing a search on the hard drive revealed no "PDFLib" file anywhere! What up with dat?



(The original Distiller 5 still works great in Classic, but it is SLOW compared to this new upgrade, which I really want to use!)



Anyone have these issues and a solution?

Thanks!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    An update.



    It seems that PDF/X1a and PDF/X3 formats work great, but not any of the others like Smallest File Size or High Quality.



    Also, if I am not running Suitcase, it works well, which makes me think the permission issue may be with the way Suitcase activates fonts and makes them available to Distiller 6.



    Oh, well, more BatChMod experimentation...
  • Reply 2 of 4
    rokrok Posts: 3,519member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by JimDreamworx

    An update.



    It seems that PDF/X1a and PDF/X3 formats work great, but not any of the others like Smallest File Size or High Quality.



    Also, if I am not running Suitcase, it works well, which makes me think the permission issue may be with the way Suitcase activates fonts and makes them available to Distiller 6.



    Oh, well, more BatChMod experimentation...




    if you're the systems admin for your studio (which it sounds like, and which i was, too), the easiest thing to do (though it requires knowing to do this from the initial install, so i don't know how much help this will be) is to devote a partition to fonts, and then get info on the partition, and check the "ignore permissions on this volume" checkbox. many problems went away once i learned to do that.



    edit: p.s. i should also say that you should try to have a permission free volume for anything that multiple users will need to access over and over again. supposedly, the "shared" directory should accomplish the same thing, but the devoted permission-free partition seems pretty fool-proof in my testing (just wish i could lock it to read-only so no one could mess with its innards, but that usually just causes different sets of problems)



    edit: p.p.s. oh, jim, here's another piece of advice... adobe applications are NOTORIOUS under mac os x for not seeing fonts, even if they are activated by the system, unless they are either in a.) the application folder in the "required" folder and/or b.) in the acrobat "required" fonts folder. i am not kidding. if you can discover the fonts used in your problem document, try copying the necessary fonts to be embedded into those folders. it doesn't hurt anything, other than it utterly negates the use of a font management tool and leaves copies of fonts littered all over the place. but you would be shocked to see how many problems in PDF creation that has corrected.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    Thank you very much, rok!



    You have assumed correctly about my work and I will be taking all of your suggestions under advisement. That is a very good idea about partitioning the drive for a location for fonts.



    It also sounds that we have discovered the same issues with Adobe applications! Right now we use Suitcase with the Suitcase Server to maintain our fonts, but copying almost 2,000 fonts into a "required" Adobe folder may not be practical.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    One more update, for posterity.



    If you trash the FontCache folder (while Distiller is not running) located in:

    Users/username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat/Distiller 6/FontCache

    And then run Distiller 6, it seems to fix things.



    So there is a definite relationship to the way fonts are handled with this version of OS X Distiller.
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