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A script to print to distiller folders in 10.2
Authored by: Thomas Kaiser on Mar 06, '03 10:33:45AM
> Finding these "folders" as devices in Print Center requires
> holding the option key down while clicking the Add button
> and using the Advanced option.

I forgot that, thanks for the reminder...

> What printer description to select? I chose a pretty generic
> Lexmark driver and it failed. The default "generic" driver
> seems to work, but I'm not sure what functionality (if any)
> I'm loosing.

I would choose an Acrobat Distiller PPD that matches the version of the
used distiller.

> What permissions the script and watched folders should use
> (if that matters).

I could easily add the ability to change owner & group of the postscript
file. To do this, one would have to add a chown line after the chmod. I'll
add this.

> It appears that the script is supposed to reset the
> permissions to 666 on the postscript after it moves it.

Right.

> Obviously it gets moved because Distiller is finding it and
> Distilling it, but the pdf's wind up root:admin with
> -rw-rw-r-- so I can't move or delete them. The .ps files
> wind up root:admin with -rw-rw-rw-.

That's caused by the CUPS subsystem running under this account. I'll
change that to set the owner to originator of the printjob and the group
to a variable called "GROUP", that defaults to "staff"

> In spite of the name checking, Distiller is overwriting my
> output files on every attempt. There seems to be no option
> in Distiller to avoid this either.

Hmm... I tried the whole thing at a customer's site and this didn't occur
there. Maybe because he's using some custom startup procedures for
distiller. In case, distiller names the PDF derived from the %%Title:
comment in the PS-Job, it should be easy to fix that by preprending the
PostScript file with two lines... I'll look into it later.

> Armed with this information I plan to modify this script to
> work with PStill (if possible), so thank's for the tip.

Why is there a need for that? If you want low-end PDFs just use the ones,
the Quartz engine produces already.

Regards,

Thomas

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A script to print to distiller folders in 10.2
Authored by: Stone_Design on Mar 06, '03 01:18:03PM
Actually, Mac OS X's PDF may produce high resolution PDF. For example, Create will print high resolution images at their full resolution, so PStill is very useful for several reasons:
  • You may want to convert the text to outlines
  • You may want to downsample & JPEG compress images
  • You may want to losslessly shrink the bloato PDF
  • You may want to chain various PS/PDF documents
  • You may want to scale a PDF to poster size

Anyway, I prepared a tutorial on how to add automated PDF Workflow - but I'll submit that as a separate hint! Andrew Stone, co-author of PStill

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