Office and Acrobat PDFMaker toolbar in Leopard

[Tim_Golobic@adobeforums.com]

Need some guidance ...
- Just upgraded to Leopard 10.5.4
- Photoshop 7 stopped working
- Upgraded to CS3
- PDFMaker Toolbar appears in Excel
- Trying to use toolbar gives error ""PDFMaker could not locate the Adobe PDF printer. Please install the printer on this machine."
- Not sure how to install this printer. Other topics have been specific to Tiger and Jaguar.

Thanks

Tim

[Mike Kazlow@adobeforums.com]

Tim,

Photoshop 7 is too old, you should not be expected to run under Leopard.
What did you upgrade to CS3? Photoshop? Acrobat? You need Acrobat
8.2.1 to be compatible with Leopard.

The PDFMaker gives you no extra capabilities on the Mac. I recommend
either printing to the Adobe PDF instance or using Apple's PDF
capability for creating pdfs under Leopard. You did not mention which
version of Excel you are using I don't believe the PDFMaker toolbar is
compatible with the latest version of Office.

Mike

[Tim_Golobic@adobeforums.com]

Right, I had to drop PS 7 due to Leopard.

I did the whole suite for CS3. It's Acrobat Pro 8.0.0.

While I know I can always create PDF easy enough from OSX, having a single button in the Office toolbar seemed a tad more convenient.

It's actually Office v X, two versions old.

Tim

[Mike Kazlow@adobeforums.com]

Tim,

You can upgrade 8.0.0 to 8.1.2 for free. It is leopard compatible. The
toolbars should work in your version of office.

For me keyboard shortcuts beat the toolbar every time. Command-P creates
my pdfs, I leave the Adobe PDF as my default printer. I create pdfs much
more often then I print to paper.

Mike

[Jon Bessant]

FYI - The PDF Maker no longer exists with Acrobat 9 Pro (thought I would
throw that one in) ....

Jon

[pjonesCET@adobeforums.com]

Also please note that PDFMaker is a invention created by adobe to work specifically with MS Office. And will work on all version up to Office2004 on Mac.

However, In its infinite wisdom, and not realizing the wrath and backlash they would receive from Office Mac Users, dumped all VBA support in Office2008. Well, PDFMaker is a Casualty of that along with other such goodies as Solver in Excel and many other Macro based commands. MS has received such heat that they absolutely promise it will be back in Office 2010, 11, 12 whatever the next version is, at possible sacrifice of new features.

So if your trying to use with Office 2008 it won't work, you can't get it to work.

Besides, now in Office2008 you can actually create a PDF directly from the Save As command. And has solved a problem or bug Adobe has never figured out how to fix where if you created a PDF from a word document, would break the pdf into chunks depended upon whether you used Page and section Breaks. And would only create a PDF of the first sheet in an Excel spread sheet. A problem Adobe hasn't fixed in 13-14 years at least.

As to quality of the PDF created I have no idea. but they look great for the web.

So I can see why Jon threw in his comment about being removed in 9.

[Tim_Golobic@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for all of the replies.

Now that I have the PDF printer added successfully, I have foregone the toolbar and just leaving the printer set as the default and doing that.

But now I have a whole new question. I drag a group of Excel files from a folder directly on to the printer shortcut. Everything opens as converts to PDF just fine. However, all of the PDFs get saved to the desktop instead of the folder from where the original item is.

Any idea on how to set this? I've checked out various preference settings with no luck.

Tim

[Aandi_Inston@adobeforums.com]

>So since PDFMaker is gone, is there another way to create pdf's and still preserve hyperlinks?

There never was a way to do this using Acrobat in Mac OS, and there
still isn't.

Aandi Inston

[Leilani_Banks@adobeforums.com]

So since PDFMaker is gone, is there another way to create pdf's and still preserve hyperlinks?

I tried to import my .doc into Acrobat 8.1.2 Professional but it said it's an unsupported file format (!?) I checked my prefs and it only lists Microsoft Word for "convert FROM pdf"...now how does that make sense?

[Leilani_Banks@adobeforums.com]

so glad I became a mac user :-(

[Steve_Werner@adobeforums.com]

Leilani,

Just send a thank you note to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at Microsoft for making good cross-platform applications like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft PowerPoint! (Oh, sorry, guess Bill's only the Microsoft board now...just send it to Steve).

[pjonesCET@adobeforums.com]

If your using Office2008 there is a better way. MS got fed up with Adobe not figuring out how to read their page breaks and section breaks after 20 or so years. (Since Acrobat 1)

So with Office2008 MS has come out with their own PDF converter.

Go to Save as look for PDF choose and create the pdf. Its faster than the PDFMaker ever was.

[Leilani_Banks@adobeforums.com]

I know pjonesCET, BUT it does not preserve hyperlinks. Every time I update my pdf CV with links to publications, I have to recreate them (over 100) every time in Acrobat instead of just having them transfer from Word. grr!

[pjonesCET@adobeforums.com]

The Mac Version of Office has never provided the technology to allow that. One More way That Bill Gates thumb(s) his nose at Jobs and Macs.

You can open the PDF's created within Office and add the links as needed. I know its a PIA and more than one step to do.

Buts its the cards, we as Mac users are dealt. While Software companies, fall all over themselves cooperating with each other in the PC world. But in The Mac world they take any opportunity put up road blocks to make Mac Users miserable. IT almost if everyone is working for te Failure of Apple Computer and Macs.

But if you end up like most Mac Users, That just makes dig in even harder.

[Damon_Jack@adobeforums.com]

Hi,

My son and I have Mac Office 2008 and CS3 which was partially bought with the intention of producing pdfs from word documents with the hyperlinks and Table of Contents links remaining in tact.

Well, after all that expense for the new software we're shocked to discover it simply doesn't work - hyperlinks are random and TOC completely broken. It works fine on my ancient PC at work (Word 2003 + Acrobat Standard 7) but not on the more recent software for the Mac. Looking at the forums it's really not clear if it's a Microsoft or Adobe issue - either way we're disgusted this software was released for the Mac without this common publishing being sorted out.

OK, sorry,....rant over..

On a more optimistic note I'd be really grateful if someone could shed some light on this problem - I certainly don't want to buy duplicate Word and Acrobat PC software for home use just to do what the Mac software should already do.

Regards,

Damon

[Tembowa@adobeforums.com]

Damon,

Since neither MS or Adobe has a solution on the Mac then here is an option. If you want to create PDF files that maintain the links from a MS Word document, you can open them in OpenOffice for Mac and then use that applications PDF creation feature to do the job. It's not Adobe or Microsoft but it gets you where you want to be.

One caveat is that you will probably need to install Apple's X11 from the DVD. Not sure if Leopard includes that by default.

~T

[Damon_Jack@adobeforums.com]

Thanks Tembowa for your thoughts on this - I really appreciate it.

I have actually tried OpenOffice which is OK but unfortunately it doesn't reproduce the header and footer formats correctly that we use in our Word documents.

Switching to OpenOffice would require too much reformatting for the number of documents we convert.

This must be a common issue with so many people publishing documents on Macs these days - I'm frankly surprised more people don't complain about it. Perhaps they do but we don't hear about it.......?

Regards,

Damon

[pjonesCET@adobeforums.com]

If you have Office 2008 for Mac and are attempting to use the PDFMaker forget it. Office 2008 no longer has VBA system bulit in which creates Macros for Office Products.

There is a better way.

once you have created your Excel Spreadsheet/Database, or word document and save. Go to the File menu and choose Save As....

wait for the Menu and mouse down until you see PDF choose that.

Document should be saved within a few seconds if not to large. Time varies according to document size.

Microsoft got tired of Adobe not figuring out the code for Page Breaks and Sections breaks. So they created their own converter. (15-20 years is long enough to wait).

Many colleges and Universities gave MS the riot act for ditching VBA on Mac platform, so it will be in the next version (2,3,4 years from now).

[Damon_Jack@adobeforums.com]

Hi pjonesCET,

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

I tried your pdf method with one of our Word documents and that still didn't work - no TOC or live hyperlinks at all.

The thought of going back to my clunkety clunk PC to do such a simple task almost makes my blood boil - but, maybe that's what I'll just have to do......

Regards,

Damon

[pjonesCET@adobeforums.com]

Adobe claims that Ms doesn't provide the necessary hook within Office Mac to provide for the live items described.