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Message started by Christer on May 20th, 2008 at 1:07pm

Title: IE7 + Acrobat Distiller
Post by Christer on May 20th, 2008 at 1:07pm
From a different thread:


Quote:
I have tried IE7 but it screwed up Acrobat Distiller. With IE6 installed, it printed vertically oriented text perfectly but not with IE7. I did a trial installation of Acrobat 8 but the result was the same. I don't know if it has been fixed but I doubt there will be a fix for my old version and I will not upgrade to any more recent version that gets fixed. Conclusion: I stay with IE6!

(I even tried some freeware PDF creators but they were even worse. Vertically oriented text seems to be a problem.)

I'm planning a clean install of XP pro with SP3 slipstreamed. I will try to slap on IE7 prior to installing Acrobat 6 to see if that sequence fixes the problem. I will not be holding my breath ... :-/ ... but rather my Ghost 2003 boot disks!


I have a spare HDD to play with and have installed IE7 on a clean installation of Windows XP SP3 with Office XP SP3, everything fully updated. Next, I installed Acrobat 6.0 and promptly updated to version 6.0.6 (the most recent).

From within Access, I generated a PDF from a report with horisontally oriented text only. It went well. Next, I attempted to generate a PDF from a report with some vertically oriented text (a few labels) but it generated the error log below:


Quote:
%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%
%%[ Error: rangecheck; OffendingCommand: endcidrange ]%%

Stack:
36823
(×)
(×)
36822
(Ö)
(Ö)
36821
(Õ)
(Õ)
36820
(Ô)
(Ô)
36819
(Ó)
(Ó)
36818
(Ò)
(Ò)
36817
(Ñ)
(Ñ)
36816
(Ð)
(Ð)
36815
(Ï)
(Ï)
36814
(Î)
(Î)
36813
(Í)
(Í)
36812
(Ì)
(Ì)
36811
(Ë)
(Ë)
36810
(Ê)
(Ê)
36809
(É)
(É)
36808
(È)
(È)
36807
(Ç)
(Ç)
36806
(Æ)
(Æ)
36805
(Å)
(Å)
36804
(Ä)
(Ä)
36803
(Ã)
(Ã)
36802
(Â)
(Â)
36801
(Á)
(Á)
36800
(À)
(À)
36799
(¿)
(¿)
36798
(¾)
(¾)
36797
(½)
(½)
36796
(¼)
(¼)
36795
(»)
(»)
36794
(º)
(º)
36793
(¹)
(¹)
36792
(¸)
(¸)
36791
(·)
(·)
36790
(¶)
(¶)
36789
(µ)
(µ)
36788
(´)
(´)
36787
(³)
(³)
36786
(²)
(²)
36785
(±)
(±)
36784
(°)
(°)
36783
(¯)
(¯)
36782
(®)
(®)
36781
(­)
(­)
36780
(¬)
(¬)
36779
(«)
(«)
36778
(ª)
(ª)
36777
(©)
(©)
36776
(¨)
(¨)
36775
(§)
(§)
36774
(¦)
(¦)
-mark-


%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%


Anyone out there who understands gibberish?

Christer

Title: Re: IE7 + Acrobat Distiller
Post by Nigel Bree on May 20th, 2008 at 6:39pm

Christer wrote on May 20th, 2008 at 1:07pm:
Anyone out there who understands gibberish?

Heh, that's not gibberish - it's just the PostScript debug stack. PostScript is actually quite a nice programming language in many ways, especially for the era when it was devised; although it grew as an evolution of Forth, it was a pretty big evolution and when Level 2 added garbage collection it was basically better as a compilation target than the JVM which came years later.

Digression:

What you are using (Acrobat Distiller) is an evolution of this program, the PostScript Distillery, which is a work of genius. When Glenn Reid released this, it blew my mind (especially since at the time I hadn't moved on to Scheme).

Essentially it's a simple, readable example of a partial evaluator built on using the language's own reflective capabilities. The regular PostScript system evaluates the program to "optimize" just as it normally would, but the Distillery redefined the drawing words to capture the final output commands and recreate the PostScript source text to just call them again. Hey presto - the output is a optimized, restricted subset of PostScript.

PDF was the result of commercializing this; Type 1 fonts were already a compressed, tokenized subset of drawing words, so the evolution to do the same to the output documents from the Distillery was natural. PDF is compressed PostScript bytecode, which has been preprocessed by one pass through interpreting the source PostScript program.

In fact, this is really responsible for the disaster that is Java and its' VM: they were designed based on experience Gosling had with the NEWS windowing system, which like many of the best windowing environments of the time - those from SGI's and NeXT as well - was based on Display PostScript.

End Digression

Anyway, "endcidrange" refers to a thing called CID fonts. The installation of IE7 will have resulted in some changes to the fonts on your system, and this may have caused the Windows printing system (or possibly Adobe Type Manager, if that's still always installed alongside Distiller) to have made some different choices when mapping the fonts in the source program to the fonts sent to the printer driver (in this case the Distiller).

Presumably one of the CID fonts you have doesn't contain one of the symbol characters that appear on that run-time stack, and one of the things that IE7 has changes is causing this particular CID font to be used when it wasn't before.

Figuring out how to resolve it will be the tricky part; really what you want is the right version of the CID font that has those symbol characters so you don't need to deal with diagnosing the (rather opaque) font substitution path, since the substitution choices can be made all over the place (the application, Windows, ATM, the postscript driver, and Distiller).

Title: Re: IE7 + Acrobat Distiller
Post by Christer on May 21st, 2008 at 2:41am
Nigel,
thanks for your response!

Could it be the non-standard Swedish characters? There is one word containing such a character: "Anmärkning" (which means "note" or "comment").

I will substitute an "a" for the "ä" to see what happens.

Christer

Edited: On a second thought, it cannot be the non-standard Swedish characters. Documents littered with them print OK. It has to be something with the vertical orientation.

Title: Re: IE7 + Acrobat Distiller
Post by Nigel Bree on May 21st, 2008 at 8:20am
It's more likely to be one of the characters on that stack backtrace; those things which are on the PostScript run-time stack are part of what the PostScript word that failed was trying to chew on at the time.

It's hard to know if the problem character is something in your document or one of the things being written out as part of the leading PostScript header for the document by the print drivers, since it isn't reporting where in the intermediate PostScript document stage things are failing. It's probably good to try and narrow down how much you print, to try and create the minimal-sized output document that produces the error, so there's less to sift through (and if you get lucky and there is a specific trigger element in the source document).

Also, I haven't used Distiller in quite a few years but something you can try is printing first to a PostScript file and then trying to run that through Distiller separately rather than trying to go directly to PDF. It may be that you get a more detailed error report that way, and if nothing else works we can at least eyeball the PostScript source code.

Title: Re: IE7 + Acrobat Distiller
Post by Christer on May 21st, 2008 at 8:32am
I have ruled out the Swedish characters. It still produces an error log. I will try to print a report with nothing entered (a blank report). I will have to put it on hold for a day or two ... :-/ ... since more urgent matters have to be dealth with.

I'll be back!

Christer

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