Printing pdf's

[CJH]

For many years I have been using Acrobat Pro V.8 for printing pdf's of my PC drawings, these pdf's have worked well over many different print services. In Snow Leopard Acrobat 8 is broken and must be upgraded to V.9. However there is a real negative to this: in V.8 with the sheet to be printed open, Option-P will bring up the pdf printer, hit return, past in a name and the pdf is created-a very fast work flow for printing multiple sheets. In V.9 it appears that one must in the print box use the mouse to 'print adobe pdf' then proceed with naming the print-this is a slower work flow and no different than using the Mac OS built-in 'save as pdf'.
So since the work flow benefit of V.8 is gone, my question is do others use the Mac OS built-in pdf printer for your construction documents, and how well do these pdfs work with print services to create paper prints?

[Rob C]

I've been using the MacOS print to PDF for some time since I had trouble with one version of Adobe's PDF print driver. I can't remember now what the issue was.

[phansford]

I have only used the Mac OS print to PDF and I have had no problems with it and have had a number of different print shops use them over the years.

Also - with 10.5 you are able to manage the PDF to some level. You can drag PDF's into one file - so you could put all of your drawings into one file and email that to your printer. You can also delete and rearrange the pages with the PDF.

[pbacot]

I don't think 10.5 preview improves on what OP is talking about. In fact the print pdf process now requires you to mouse an OK to replace an existing file, whereas it only took a return before.

I'd say CopyCat is a good workflow answer but I don't seem able to get it to work with 10.5.

[Kent]

We have been using the Mac OS built-in print to pdf for 2 or 3 years now and it works fine. We also use a free program that I found online called Combine PDFs to combine all the individual sheets into a multi-sheet pdfs. (We are still using OS10.4) This helps with in house printing (half-size - 12 x 1 of sets without having to collate. Our printing service prefers the individual pdfs so that is what we give them.

We had an issue a year or so with the printing of pdfs at the printing service. It had to do with the text. Every carriage return printed out as a square instead of blank. After a couple of trials we were able to eliminate the issue and have not had any problems since.

[CJH]

Thanks all for the responses. Since Acrobat Pro also now requires a mouse down to 'print to adobe pdf', I'll try using the built in 'save as pdf' for a while and see if I have any issues with print services.

[phansford]

[pbacot]

[poolvibe]

I use a utility called pdf compress. It slims pdfs to small size for email etc.
http://www.metaobject.com/Products/