TechNote

Acrobat 9 "Save As Adobe PDF" Support in Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6).

Issue

When you attempt to print to the Adobe PDF Printer in Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), the Adobe PDF Printer is not in the Printer list or if it is present, it is unusable.

Reason

Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6)'s enhanced security features prevent Adobe's PDF Printer from functioning as it did in previous versions. As a result Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.1 removes the Adobe PDF Printer and adds a new Save as Adobe PDF function. Customers using earlier versions of Adobe Acrobat will find that the Adobe PDF Printer is unusable when running on Snow Leopard.

Solution

1. Use the "Save As Adobe PDF" menu item from the Print Dialog>PDF menu.

2. If you are using Adobe Acrobat 9.0, then update to Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.1 and the Updater will remove the Adobe PDF Printer. The "Save As Adobe PDF" menu item will now be in the Print dialog>PDF menu list.

3. If you have updated from Mac OS X Leopard (v10.5) to Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6) and the Adobe PDF Printer is still present in the Print dialog's Printer list, simply remove the Adobe PDF Printer from printers list. The "Save As Adobe PDF" menu item will now be in the Print dialog>PDF menu list.

To remove the Adobe PDF Printer from the Printers list follow the instructions below:

1. Go to the Apple> System Preferences... menu item.

2. Open the "Print & Fax" preference panel.

3. Select the Printing tab, to get to the printers list.

4. Select the printer "Adobe PDF 9.0".

5. Click the minus ( - ) button.

6. Close the "Print & Fax" preference panel.

Additional Information

Technical changes made to Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6) are preventing Adobe from delivering a Postscript-based printer module as we have on previous versions of Mac OS X and as we do on Windows.

However, because Mac OS X already uses a PDF-based printing architecture, we have taken this opportunity to replace the previous technology with a modern PDF Workflow solution.

Therefore, instead of selecting a special printer, you need only go to the "PDF" button in the Print dialog and choose "Adobe PDF" to have the standard Apple PDFs converted to Adobe-quality PDFs based on your JobOption settings.

The benefits of PDF to PDF are much better performance, higher quality PDFs, the ability to create PDFs that are compliant with Standard such as PDF/X and PDF/A, the potential for adding functionality to PDFs such as bookmarks, hyperlinks and watermarks.

Users of non-Adobe Postscript-based publishing applications should be aware that due to this change, they can no longer print directly to Adobe PDFs and instead need to use another method for PDF creation.