Okay, this is a semi-technical, but bear with me. So, I purchased the educational version of Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional. Not a big deal because I’ve worked with version 6.0 before and it works perfectly on my Windows XP Home computer. Well, that was XP. This is Windows Vista and 64-bit vista to boot. There were so many problems that I don’t know where to begin. So, I’ll bullet-point the issues.
- “The file AdobePDF.dll is needed“: The first time this happened, i panicked and quit the installation. I re-installed Adobe Acrobat 8.0 a second time and when this dialog popped up again, I looked for the Amd64 folder (versus the I386 folder it initially looks at for AdobePDF.dll) and found a file called AdobePDF.dll there. I thought, “Voila!”, all was well. Then, I discovered that printing was extremely sketchy i.e. it would print, then it would hang up my computer and I’d have to go into the Windows task manager to kill the process manually. The issue with printing to the Adobe PDF printer started with being unable to print from Firefox then Internet Explorer until the Adobe Printer entered an error state. At this point, I decided to “modify” my installation which, prior to all of this, had been since been updated to Adobe 8.1.2 from 8.0. Modifying my Adobe Acrobat installation was done by going to the Control Panel in Windows Vista (64-bit version) and clicking “Programs and Features”. I right-clicked on the installation I wanted to change and a dialog box came up asking if I wanted to: modify, repair or remove my installation. I selected “modify” and simply re-installed the program again. Notably, I didn’t get a dialog box asking for AdobePDF.dll anymore. So the point of my ramblings, if you are having trouble with your Adobe PDF printer, your first tactic should be to modify the installation and simply re-install.
Here’s the gnarly part of my suggestion. After I had a second Adobe PDF printer showing up in my “Printers” list, I tried to print out a page to the “working” PDF printer. Well, it printed, but somehow it kept printing to the faulty Adobe PDF printer also!! I got my PDF file alright, but the other PDF printer was going nuts. I finally went into the printer properties by right-clicking the troublesome printer and then, selected “properties”. I went to the “Ports” tab and clicked the 2 Adobe PDF printers listed then. Then, I hit “enable printer pooling.” I have no idea what that did at the time, but I was just frustrated. To my uneducated mind, I understood the solution to my problem at the time (having 2 printers that did the same thing except one worked and the other didn’t) as being: I needed to merge the 2 printers. “Pooling” meant something close to “merging” so I pooled the 2 printers ports which were: (i) LPT1 (the bad Adobe PDF printer) and (ii) Documents\*.pdf which was the working Adobe PDF printer. Immediately after pooling the printers, the bad Adobe PDF printer disappeared from the Printers” list.- The story didn’t end at that though. Sorry to disappoint. I tried to print and I got the another darned error message. Thankfully, this error message was rather descriptive so I was able to understand that I need to send my print command directly to the printer! This is in contrast to spooling your documents in order to print to an actual printer.
- After I did that, I was able to print and life is back to normal! 😀 Enough technology for you? I was so worried that I forgot to take screenshots of the process. One idea that I’d had in my mind is creating a site where a real person who doesn’t really know that much about computers can come to and find step-by-step directions (or close to step-by-step) directions. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve searched online for answers to issues that have ridiculously simple answers and yet, many sites unknowingly provide non-answers.
- Some things I tried that may have impacted the happy ending were: restarting the print spooler service by going to “Administrative Tools” and clicking “Services”. Your best bet to solve your particular issue would be to go to the Adobe Knowledge Base article that addresses the initial error message of the AdobePDF.dll file being needed. The other thing that will shave a couple of hours of your time would be to update your Adobe Acrobat 8.0 base installation to the new version 8.1.2 which addresses some of the issues that could lead to printing problems.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, my next program to attack will be the Microsoft Sync Center and the Mobile Device Center. I’m really unhappy with that and I hope they release a solution soon. Matt’s returning home today from his camping trip. I can’t wait because the apartment was boring without him there.