Windows Vista x64 - Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional "Printer" not Generating PDFs

Out of the box, we had a couple of issues with installing Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional (previous blog post).

So, we have not been able to use the product to generate PDFs via the built-in printer AdobePDF setup.

When trying to diagnose what was going on we went into the Adobe Printing Preferences. Initially the "Adobe PDF Folder" was blank. When clicking the down arrow for any options, the only one available was LPT1:.

So, we selected LPT1:

Adobe PDF Printing Preferences & Properties

Click the General tab in Adobe PDF Properties, click on the Print Test Page button, and bingo! We have a standard Windows Printer Test Page that indicates we have correctly installed our Adobe PDF Converter.

Well, the next step was to figure out how to get it to prompt us to save the PDF in a directory.

We have another system setup with Acrobat Pro running on Windows XP Professional, so we took a look:

Adobe PDF Properties on XP Pro

So, on our Windows Vista x64 Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 did not setup those ports.

From Adobe's support site: TechNote: Error "Warning 20225..." or no Adobe PDF printer appears (Acrobat 8.0 and Acrobat 3D 8.0 on Windows).

Acrobat is not supported on a 64-bit operating system [emphasis ours]. Acrobat 8 should be able to install the printer but not the Adobe PDF port on the 64-bit operating systems; although, the remainder of Acrobat functionality should remain intact. In addition, Acrobat is unable to install the printer if extended ASCII or double-byte characters are found in the path names. Third-party programs can interfere with the installation of the printer by attaching services to the Print Spooler service or installing print monitor software. Lexmark and Dell printers are known to install services such as lexbce.exe that can generate this error message.

There is not Detect and Repair on our help menu either.

Some things are just to goofy...click "Check for Updates" and the first thing it does is download 168MB of updates.

The first one it installs is on Acrobat, so after the update is done, guess what:

Adobe PDF Port is now available

Adobe, you have great timing! :D The Help --> Repair Acrobate Acrobat Installation menu item is there too.

Some further links:

• Adobe's statement on Windows x64 support: Support policy for Adobe Acrobat 8.0.x Windows x64.
• Adobe Forum thread: Support for Windows 64 bit.

Kudos to Adobe for bringing about an update to support those of us who have paid the big bucks for their products.

It is good to see!

UPDATE 2007-09-25: Okay, my bad ... It is Acrobat not Acrobate! :D

UPDATE 2008-08-26: As per the comments:

1. In the Printer list delete the Adobe PDF printer
2. In Acrobat run the repair routine.

Once the repair has run, you may need to update your Acrobat installation to the newest revision.

That works.

Thanks to those who commented for contributing a fix! :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.