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Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows?

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In article <j74p1s$cas$1@dont-email.me>, dmathog@gmail.com says...
 
> The title pretty much says it all, I am curious what technique Adobe 
> uses to add PDF generation to existing programs.  Can anybody describe 
> what is involved?

Unless things have changed since I last looked, they don't add 
generation within existing programs.

Acrobat installs a virtual printer which takes PostScript (created by 
the existing Windows print dirver) and converts it to PDF by using 
Distiller. The buttons and menu items installed which appear to do this 
directly simply automate (and hide) the process of selecting the printer 
and so forth.

The applications supported by Adobe often include some kind of scripting 
and in these cases the print stream can be decorated with pdfamrk 
operations which add metadata to the final PDF.

 
> I had to bite the bullet and install Acrobat X on a Windows XP machine 
> because people kept sending me PPT documents with transparent objects, 
> and there is no way to print those to PDF through any of the PDF 
> generators which appear as Postscript printers.

That's because (as you note below) PostScript does not support a 
transparent graphics model, so overlapping transparent objects have to 
be converted to an opaque representation. 

As noted above, pdfmarks (a PostScript extension only applicable to 
creating PDF files) will allow the use of transparency. While I haven't 
looked at what the Acrobat code is doing I would suspect this is what is 
going on behind the scenes.


> the program.  It would be nice if there was some way to do this 
> generally, allowing Ghostscript (for instance) to do the same thing, 
> bypassing the limitations of the Postscript printer driver once and for all.

Ghostscript supports transparency in PostScritp by a series of 
extensions, specifically to allow printing of transparent PDF files. So 
if you can find out how the Acrobat program extensions are dealing with 
transparency in the source application, and feel like doing a little 
programming, you can probably duplicate the effect.


		Ken

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How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? mathog <dmathog@gmail.com> - 2011-10-12 12:16 -0700
  Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2011-10-13 07:59 +0100
    Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? mathog <dmathog@gmail.com> - 2011-10-14 09:14 -0700
      Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2011-10-14 17:43 +0100
        Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? mathog <dmathog@gmail.com> - 2011-10-14 14:24 -0700
          Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? Matti Vuori <xmvuori@kolumbus.fi> - 2011-10-16 15:23 +0000
  Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> - 2011-10-13 12:51 -0400

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