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Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing?

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

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On Fri, 29 Aug 2025 03:51:54 +0100, J. P. Gilliver wrote :


> On 2025/8/28 23:15:49, Marion wrote:
> 
> []
> 
>> I bought that Adobe Acrobat 6 (writer) to do work at home (so the company
>> paid for it) before I retired and I've being using it ever since. The
>> registered name & serial number is still that of the company, but it works
>> on any PC I have installed it on (namely mine and that of my wife & kids).
> 
> Presumably that was before the common "print" to PDF "printers" came
> along (I, and the guy who writes the genealogy software I use, use
> pdf995, but I think they're all similar). [Or does it do more than just
> _create_ PDFs?]>

Your instincts seem right as in the "olden days", it was hard to "create"
or "modify" PDFs, especially when we often started, in those days, with PS.

This is well before "Adobe Acrobat" meant also the reader.
I don't even recall if the reader existed in those days - probably not.

Also, the Adobe Acrobat (writer) always came with the PS-to-PDF Distiller.

>> The company also bought Acrobat 7 (writer) for me, but that requires the
>> Internet to run so I don't bother installing it since it's the same anyway.
> 
> Presumably does _something_ 6 doesn't, to justify presumably a higher
> price and later support calendar, but something so obscure you never use
> whatever it is.[]

Nah. Very few programs do something important after they mature.
The old Acrobat (writer) is just fine.

In fact, the new Acrobat (reader) does a lot of what the writer did, IMHO.

>> As far as I bother to delve into "forms", I seem to run into two types.
> 
> Not a matter of bothering: I gather from what I've read on newsgroups
> that the US tax office uses some that you have no choice about using.

It's not hard to edit a PDF when you have an image editor that has access
to fonts, where I wouldn't use Irfanview like you do, as I use Paint.NET.

>> But what I do is save the non-fillable PDF form to an editable image format
>> and then edit in Paint.NET using the text editor which is almost perfect.
> 
> I've done that (well, I use IrfanView for almost anything involving
> images). Or, where I've felt particularly irritated by "their" use of
> such a format, put it into an form Word can edit (I think Word may even
> be able to open PDFs, at least after a certain version of Word [I use
> 2003]). (Your "b." and "c."; don't think I've ever come across a "d.")

If you need to convert almost any document format to Word, you can't beat
the free Calibre program, which is, IMHO, the best of the best of the best.

It can't create magic with bitmaps though, but it is magic with PDF text.

>> Works perfectly. I use FinePrint for that for years, but I just checked the
>> comp.text.pdf chart which is shown below which shows other tools can do it.
> 
> I remember coming across something that would independently produce
> booklets (not sure what from - might have been PDFs), but the free
> version either had a fairly small page-number limit, or added something
> to each page, or both. That might have been FinePrint - the name sounds
> familiar.

FinePrint was fantastic but it was $25 last I had my company buy it for me.
 (AcroTeX))

>>  [x] Print booklet format (pdfbook, pdfbooklet, enbooken, acrobat reader)
> Part way through that, I gave up... 

You only need that first line. 
I'll write a tutorial for others to follow. But not right now.
 Tutorial: How to print a PDF booklet for free on Windows 
 (or something like that).

>> I used to do it a lot with FinePrint, so when you find the Adobe Acrobat
>> version that does it (as mine doesn't seem to do it), let us all know.
> 
> (Printing booklets that is.) Well, what I've discovered over the last
> few days: The current free one from Adobe does it (it's just
> big/bloated/unstable IMO, whih was the reason for my starting this
> thread: I was going to uninstall the bloatware [which I have], and
> install the earliest that had that facility). Versions 5 and 9 don't. I
> couldn't get versions X or XI to install on this machine, but according
> to at least one person here (Paul I think it was), XI does have that
> ability. And version "Classic 2020" does too.

Yeah. I saw that. I wasn't following closely but Paul is a genius.

>> Digging deeper, I found there's an older version of "pdfbooklet" which is
>> on SourceForge which runs on Windows/Linux/macOS which we should maybe try.
>>  <https://pdfbooklet.sourceforge.io/wordpress/>
> 
> I think I'll just use Adobe.

There are online converters too.
 <https://enbooken.com/>
 <https://bookbinder.app/>
 <https://www.bookletcreator.com/>
 <https://online2pdf.com/en/create-a-booklet>
 etc.

Supposedly they don't save your PDF but I didn't check them out further.

>> Of course, there's the Adobe Acrobat Reader mechanism too.
>>  <https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/print-booklets-acrobat-reader.html>
> See other subthread - someone suggested this "Classic 2020" version of
> Acrobat, which _did_ install OK on this machine. I'm awaiting the answer
> to "what exactly is it", since it actually comes from the Adobe site,
> unlike other "Classic" softwares I've come across.

I think that's interesting that there is a "classic" version, whatever that
really means (as I wasn't following the subthread diligently).

If it's just the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, I'm not sure what the value is.
Does it have more functionality than the free reader does?
Or just less bloat?

I'm asking only because I'm not sure what the value is over the free Reader
that you and I could download any time we want to download & install it.

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Thread

Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-08-28 01:12 +0000
  Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-08-28 03:38 +0100
    Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-08-28 22:15 +0000
      Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-08-29 03:51 +0100
        Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-08-29 04:07 +0000
          Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2025-08-29 20:16 +0100
            Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-08-29 19:44 +0000
              Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-11-05 11:28 +0000
              Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2026-04-18 23:03 +0100
                Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2026-04-19 00:39 +0200
        Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-08-29 23:01 +0200
    Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-08-29 22:56 +0200
  Re: Acrobat - earliest version with booklet printing? Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> - 2025-11-19 14:42 +0300

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