GHS BULLETIN
Printing GHS reports as PDF files




Owners of Adobe Acrobat version 4 or later (not just Acrobat Reader) can easily create GHS reports formatted as PDF files.

To do this, click the GHS "Report" menu then choose "Select printer" and "Primary". In the resulting dialog box, locate a printer titled either "Acrobat Distiller" or "Adobe PDF" and select it. This causes future GHS reports to be printed automatically through Adobe Acrobat, which prompts for a filename to assign to the new PDF file.

This same PDF printer configuration may also be done from the GHS command line or in a run file using the command: 
    PRINT CONFIGURE "Acrobat Distiller"
...or... 
    PRINT CONFIGURE "Acrobat PDF"
To save Condition Graphic displays as PDF files, click the "Report" menu then choose "Select printer" and "Secondary". In the resulting dialog box, select either "Acrobat Distiller" or "Adobe PDF" printer. This can also be done from the GHS command line or in a run file using the 
    PRINT CONFIGURE SECONDARY command.
Different versions of Adobe Acrobat have different names for its print driver used to create PDF files, which has caused some confusion. Prior to version 4, Acrobat used an obsolete printer driver named "Acrobat PDFWriter" which is not supported by GHS. More recent versions of Adobe Acrobat install PDF-creating print drivers as follows:

* Acrobat 4 automatically installs "Acrobat Distiller"; it also installs "Acrobat PDFWriter" for compatibility with older programs.

* Acrobat 5 automatically installs only "Acrobat Distiller" (but "Acrobat PDFWriter" exists on the CD in case someone needs to manually install it).

* Acrobat 6 automatically installs Distiller, but its printer driver has been renamed "Adobe PDF" printer to avoid confusion with the "Adobe Distiller" program used to convert PDFs from existing Postscript documents (preferably created by Adobe's "Generic Postscript Printer" targeted to Acrobat PDFs). "Acrobat PDFWriter" has been completely eliminated from this release.

* "Acrobat Distiller" printer driver is also available bundled with the Adobe Pagemaker product and in "Acrobat Distiller Server" network packs.

To summarize, be sure to use either the "Acrobat Distiller" or "Adobe PDF" print driver (not "Acrobat PDFWriter").

Generally the default configuration of Acrobat works fine to successfully create PDF reports within GHS. Sometimes the Acrobat "printer" page size is not realistic. For example, normal printer pages have a small unprintable border at the very top and bottom of the page. If this is missing for the Acrobat page, then any GHS page footer may be positioned too low on the page. If so, then the /FOOTMARGIN:inches parameter can be used during printing to adjust the footer margin upwards by a specified value in inches.

Alternatively, you can right-click the "Acrobat Distiller" or "Adobe PDF" icon in the "Printers" control panel and choose "Printing Preferences", then click the "Adobe PDF Settings" tab, and click "Edit Conversion Settings". These settings include page size and resolution in DPI for the output PDF file, which can be adjusted as desired or to circumvent any problems that might arise during GHS printing to Adobe Acrobat (for example, if the current resolution was much too high, this could cause memory-related problems).


If you would like to see another bulletin created regarding a specific topic, please email Creative Systems, Inc. at support@ghsport.com.


Copyright (C) 2011 Creative Systems, Inc.