Leopard Word Adobe PDF Export Problems

Another Leopard Icky Sticky
Yesterday, while working on a Microsoft Word file (in Microsoft's almost ancient version of Office for the Mac, Office 2004), I ran across another icky sticky Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard problem. The problem occured when I went to export the Word file to PDF. In short, I couldn't. It did not work. The computer gave me the error: "please install Adobe PDF Printer." When I tried to do that from the appropriate printer pane (which should be spelled pain, that is now located in Leopard's System Preferences panel) the install failed. Here is how the problem was described by Andrew Miller on an Apple forum:

My 3 physical printers work, but Adobe PDF is not. When adding it asked to select driver and gave me 2 Adobe 8.0 options, both the same. Doesn't matter which I select it simply doesn't work. When printing from Word to Adobe PDF pinter pauses and doesn't want to restart the job.

I was well agitated when I found this. This is the second Leopard Icky Sticky I found in one day (the Treo problem being the first.) Then, on the Apple forum I found a fix. It is more a hack than a fix, but it works, written by a guy named Jerry:

I was able to get back my Adobe PDF. here's how I did it:

• Launch Acrobat (in my case it is version 8)
• Select "Repair Acrobat Installation" under the Help menu
• Deselect everything except for the "Adobe PDF Printer"
• Click continue and you're done!

-Jerry

I do not think you should have to do these kinds of things to get your software to work! I installed Leopard as a clean install, not an upgrade install, on this computer. All the software on this computer has had all updates applied and all was up to date as of yesterday. I do not mean to sound like I am ragging on Leopard. It is a great OS. But, it just needs to get its bugs worked out. Leopard still has too many icky stickies. IMHO it has a way to go before it is ready for wide spread deployment. I would not recommend Leopard to regular users, not yet anyway!

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