I hope they've narrowed the speed gap compared to distiller on windows.

its not only the software that determines speed, also the hardware, which is lagging behind the pc...

Maybe Distiller will be slower than the PC and I understand that for alot of folks, distiller speed is crucial.. but now I can have it on my g4 dualie and do numerous other duties at the same time, ... thus not wasting time and doing other stuff as it distills. Most folks I know have lag time between distilling... so that should equalize for a speed variance...

Hey... at least it is on OSX now

MacMoose

which package contains the x version of Distiller?

adobe scriptable?

Adobe Acrobat Standard 6.0 and Acrobat Professional 6.0 both include Distiller which is now a native OS X (cocoa) application.

Shipping an OS X Acrobat 5 with a Classic Distiller sounds ridiculous. But Acrobat 5 was Classic only and Adobe released a free patch for carbonization (of the Acrobat application, not the whole package*).

However, a Carbon Distiller would have been welcome to fill the gap, and not so hard to write since it's just a very simple GUI around some (a lot of) proprietary code not related to Apple's APIs. Distiller is the really useful app is you need small PDFs but no forms, for example.

* What IS ridiculous is the constant confusion introduced by having both the package and one of the application called Acrobat.

Yes you can make a pdf in OS X without any other software but you cannot certify it for pdf-x without Acrobat. In Adobes new products you can PDFx without a plugin with the Pro version. But I have found no plugins for OS X native pdf generation.

Also you can now create forms only with the professional version.

They did change the name of the reader to "Adobe Reader". That should help with the confusion factor.

The FAQ doc states that Distiller is now OSX native. Why is there all this fuss about it *not* being native? Is there some other conflicting info about this?

The fuss is because Acrobat 5 was listed as "built for OS X" when Distiller still ran in Classic. Fool us once...

If you have tried to click on the flash introduction movie in their website, you will find they have a mac based introduction for 'creative professionals', but XP based introduction for 'engineers'.

that a missing feature in Acobat 5 for Mac OS X. does the Acobat 6 support mouse scroll button ?

Yes it does support scanning. I went to a press launch for it last night. It has lots of nifty integration stuff with future versions of InDesign etc.

The reason for the XP based introduction for engineers is they're really selling this release hard to CAD users etc as a format for distributing data, and most of those packages are XP based

It looks like many developpers skipped the carbon version to move right on to cocoa which might explain why it takes a little longer to see OS X versions.

What is the issue in scanning in Acrobat 5? This is my main use of Acrobat in 9.2.2 and I have no problems.

Hopefully Apple will continue to develop native PDF content generation within OS X - a boon. However, as Adobe provides code (as far as I am aware), I seriously doubt that Apple is able to extend its functionality too far without 'upsetting' Adobe! Then again, Apple has poached key staff from Adobe recently, so who knows?

http://homepage.mac.com/johnhood

AFTER TOMORROW MORNING I'LL BE RUNNING 10.2.6. ON THE MAC BUT AT THE MOMENT IT'S 10.2.SOMETHING. Now I've just bought and installed Acrobat 6 for the Mac but can't find the Adist6.ppd file anywhere. It seems I need this to distill Quark 4.1 files for instance. I'm also interested in how I'm supposed to use OS 10.2.? to make pdf's. It's something I've never noticed under that op. system although my apps ususally run in Classic. I do confess to coming from a PC background and after 5 years am just coming to terms with Mac fonts. Could anyone lend a helping typing key to my probs?

Car-computer analogies aren't worth the bandwidth it takes to send them (nor are any other analogies, but these are the most common abuse of discourse). Nonetheless, I'll bite:

>Only in the software industry to people expect to be kept up to
>date for free. If you bought a car and found out a week later that
>the next year's model came with standard A/c, would you go
>back and expect it for free?

The biggest difference is that next year's models come out at a specific time - if you want to wait, you know when you're waiting until and probably what you're waiting for. Software releases get announced as vapourware, then appear unpredictably - charitably we might say "when they're ready", but more realistically when the vendor needs to pad the next quarter's earnings. The air of secrecy surrounding new software releases means you never know whether you should wait, or buy now and then groan in a week. And even when they are released, you don't really know what features will have been deemed sufficiently bug-free. There was probably still a possibility that an OS X native Distiller might not have made it into Acrobat 6, or might have been so buggy as to be useless.

The same applies to hardware, really - the only time it's really safe to buy a new Mac is immediately after an update (like right now for iBooks - imagine if you'd bought a G3 a month ago). The computer industry generally has a loooong way to go in terms of customer communication. All the CRM buzzword babble in the world hasn't changed that one iota.