Section 77. About Acrobat Distiller

77. About Acrobat Distiller

See Also

78 About PostScript

79 Change Distiller Settings

Most Acrobat users, when asked the question, "What's the difference between Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader?" will say something along the lines of, "Reader only lets you view PDFs. Acrobat creates PDFs." While true in spirit, technically it is the Distiller application that creates the actual PDF file in most cases. Acrobat is used primarily to view, edit, and add functionality to existing PDFs. For this reason, Distiller is often referred to as the "PDF engine" behind Acrobat.

When you print a document to the Adobe PDF printer driver or use the Create PDF command from within Acrobat, Distiller converts the document into PDF format, but it does so in the background. You don't see Distiller launch and don't interact with it at all. This is why most Acrobat users are unaware of the role Distiller plays in PDF file creation. If you want to see Distiller for yourself, you can open it directly from the desktop by selecting Acrobat Distiller 7.0 in the Programs submenu of the Start menu (Windows) or by clicking the Acrobat Distiller 7.0 icon in the Acrobat 7 folder (Mac OS). Within Acrobat, you can launch Distiller by clicking the Advanced menu and selecting Acrobat Distiller . Incidentally, you can't do anything with Distiller unless you have a PostScript-format file handy. See 78 About PostScript for details on the relationship between PostScript, Distiller, and PDF.

NOTE

If you need to change Distiller's settings for a single print job, you can do that without launching Distiller. When printing to the Adobe PDF printer, click the Properties button in the Print dialog box and pick a different setting from the Default Setting drop-down list.

The following are three Distiller- related scenarios Acrobat users might find themselves in:

• You are creating PDFs from standard business documents for general distribution and printing. The default settings work fine for this, and there is no need to launch Distiller.

• You create large numbers of PDFs for output other than laser printers and want to optimize the output quality (for commercial printing) or minimize the file size (for email distribution or online access) for all print jobs. You need to launch Distiller and choose from one of the predefined settings to change Distiller's default behavior.

• You are preparing a document for commercial printing and have been instructed by your print shop to either change certain settings in Distiller or load a custom settings file from your print shop. You need to launch Distiller and either edit or add settings.