- - - - - - - - -
CONTEXT:
In 2010 the company I worked for bought me a Late-2009 iMac with Mac OSX 10.6 & thanks to Snow Leopard's Rosetta feature I was able to continue using FreeHand & my workflow became PERFECT ever since.
A couple of months ago I had to quit the company.
I couldn't afford waiting (who knows how long) for QUASADO's StageStack to be ready so I had to buy me another Late-2009 iMac (with Snow Leopard) so I could try to rebuild my workflow involving FreeHand.
However Acrobat CS6 didn't come with the Adobe PDF printer, which was the centerpiece of all my workflow!…
And despite all the back-ups I had done I couldn't manage to install Adobe PDF as a printer.
When opening the "Adobe PDF 9.0.app" I had backed-up it crashed but for 1 millisecond there was a pop up saying: "Print service is not working." & "No destinations added.". When printing from FreeHand there was no Printer selected. The PPD was there but there was no option to choose custom paper size and the graphic results were all awful! Though I knew they were not the pro way to go, I tried every single output option from Print > PDF, including the Save as Adobe PDF, and NONE was acceptable!: whether the paths came out all distorted, or the images turned greyscale, or the colours had that wrong typical FreeHand saturation, or the resolution was just ridiculously bad!
I googled extensively to try to bring back my Adobe PDF printer, including this forum, & found some interesting/close information BUT nothing worked for the particular case of being able to print out custom-size paper formats & truly high-quality .ps files from FreeHand.
An InDesign expert wrote "And you might as well leave the Adobe PDF printer uninstalled because it will NOT work in Snow Leopard." — wonder why… But thanks to some of my stubbornness/persistency I mixed infos & experimented until suddenly I found what was missing from all the tips!
- - - - - - - - - -
SOLUTION:
01 - Find a copy of "ADPDF9.PPD"
02 - Copy it to HD (root) > Library > Printers > PPDs
03 - Rename that "ADPDF9.PPD" to "Adobe PDF 9.PPD" (reason: allegedly Acrobat can find "ADPDF9.PPD" & delete it)
04 - Place this file in Library > Printers > PPDs
05 - Open up some artwork in FreeHand & cmd P(rint)
06 - Select "Add Printer…" from the Printer drop-down menu
07 - In the IP tab:
- - Protocol: choose Line Printer Daemon - LPD
- Address: write "Adobe PDF 9"
- Print Using: Other… / go get "Adobe PDF 9.PPD"
An "Adobe PDF 9.app" will be created in the Library > Printers folder.
When you go back to the Print Setup window in FreeHand you'll see "Adobe PDF 3018.101" instead of the former "Generic PostScript Printer" & you'll be able to have custom paper size (& a lot more!). After saving out a .ps file & Distilling it, the colours will be accurate as they should, the paths will be perfect, the resolution will be optimal, the file size will be much smaller among other advantages because PostScript transcoding heals a lot of otherwise problematic characteristics of the artwork documents. From FreeHand this is the safest way to Print. I have done final arts for millions of artworks & don't remember having any printing problem.
& all this possible again thanks to a tiny 29Kb file!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I'll leave you with the links that helped me get closer to the solution, in case you need to sort out other similar problems:
http://indesignsecrets.com/acrobats-ado ... eopard.php
http://www.henryling.co.uk/net/downloads/file_specs.pdf
F&H