AC9 - PDF challenged??

[Andy Thomson]

Just installed AC and PM9 on our 2 PC machines. One PC does not even show PDF as an option in the list of files under Publisher (acrobat is installed on this machine).

The Other PC shows PDF as an option (for publishing), but I see no 'Merge File' option as it says in the literature, AND THEN publishing even a single file, to a network or even a desktop location (doesn't even matter if the LBK file is local), causes PM to CRASH. I have repeated this several times on 2 distinct, high-end machines because I (stupidly) felt confident to work a project to its deadline on AC9 and am now paying for it.

My old version of Acrobat Pro/Distiller will no longer work - to print the layouts in a pinch, and neither does Aymuni.

I was really looking forward to the new, native PDF writing capability of PM9.
What gives??

[Andy Thomson]

PS - just noticed a whole pile of CrashDump.dmp files in my temp folder under documents and settings, Graphisoft...

BTW, I was 'saving' as publish method.

A.

[Andy Thomson]

OK, now I am miffed. It is a MAC user conspiracy to frustrate the PC loyal!
Installed on even our lowliest MAC (G4, 800), the PDF set is ripped in like 30 seconds. There is even the 'Merge Into Single File' option, unlike on PC.

Thanks you MAC loving GS programmers! Hope to see a PC patch soon!
(Or for me to stand corrected)

A.

[Greg Kmethy]

Hi,

I wrote a technote on this:
http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/archiguide/PDFfileFormatMissingInPublisher.html

The point is that ArchiCAD needs to be able to install a printer driver when starting. The technote describe how to achieve this if you are not an administrator.

You have the "merge PDF's in one singe file" only if the files are embedded in a folder. This is necessary because the one single file will get the name of this folder.

HTH,
Greg

[Andy Thomson]

I have admin status on my laptop, and the PDF icon shows.
I will follow your technote on our other PC.

The tech note doesn't address my other PM9 crashing problems.

I will try again now that my patience is renewed, but the issue was that PM9 stalled when printing the PDF set, at about page 4/7.

Thanks for the quick response

[Andy Thomson]

I added the 'Power Users' to the object names, so that Administrators and Power Users have access to load and unload devices, such as the temp printer for PM9.

Even though I am already the Administrator on this machine, and even though I successfully added the 'Power Users' option as per your technote, the PDF option is still showing as 'missing' from the list.

That the 'missing' even shows is a step forward, as the format for PDF was selected on my laptop, where I am also Administrator.

Please help!

A.

[Greg Kmethy]

When you start PlotMaker, does a '_temporary PlotMaker publisher' printer appear in the printer list? It should. Did you restart Windows after the change in rights? Maybe a reinstall/repair will do magic to your ArchiCAD/PlotMaker installation. It's possible that PlotMaker does not even try to install the tempotrary device anymore.

Greg

[Andy Thomson]

It works now on my laptop, which leads me to believe that the temporary PDF printer the publisher uses got jammed up with a bad job, and wouldn't finish, and I was unable to delete the job or interrupt the process, which wouldn't let me use the other methods of aymuni or acrobat professional to make PDF's by 'printing' them. The Publish PDF method worked for me today, but even though the files came out alright, the status box says they 'failed' see attached pic.

The other PC desktop still doesn't show the temp printer. I will reinstall AC/PM 9 on that machine.

Thanks for staying on top of this for me...

Andy

[Andy Thomson]

It seems that PM hangs when Publishing a set of PDF's when it gets to a page containing two JPEGs - they are only maybe 4MB each, and the original JPEG files are on a Mac server. I am working from a PC. I do recall a while back having to edit our smb.config file on the Mac's OSX to be able to save to the PC without my hair turning grey - I don't know if this is related, but my poor PC just hangs and hangs at full speed, see pic below...

As for the other PC desktop we are using, reinstalling AC9 did indeed work wonders, yes, the '_temp Plotmaker Publisher' shows up, and PDF is an option in the Publisher, however, when publishing a single blank layout to the desktop, it also hangs and hangs and hangs, doing nothing really but completely filling the processor with some mysterious task.

Please help! We need this to work! We are very dependent on reliable PDF generation!

[Greg Kmethy]

4MB JPEGs are huge, so is a 170 MB printing task! It will take quite a few minutes to finish. The fact that the program got in not responding state does not mean that it will not ever finish the job. Since XP Microsoft introduced this fake 'not responding' white application window. This is misleading, IMHO, because it is just faked by Windows and does not report the status of your program, which is in fact running. It will do so for a long time, I'm afraid to finish the job.

Please check your JPEGs though. We are aware that Amyuni processes images very slowly if the color depth or some other parameter of the image is corrupt. It will process it, but it will take a lot of time. Re-save your JPEGs on windows in an image manipulating program (I think even Paint will do). That might help.

If you have a placed image on your master layout, publishing a blank layout might also hang. Try to publish an empty layout with one line only. It should work. Also try printng to the Amyuni virtual printer to see if it makes a difference.

Greg