Can anyone tell me what the difference is between "converting to PDF" and "printing to PDF" from within a microsoft Word document? When I click on the Adobe PDF menu in the toolbar and then click Convert to PDF, I get an error message that it cannot locate the Adobe PDF Printer's printer driver and that I need to reinstall Adobe 9.0. However, when I print to PDF from the File menu, everything goes off without a hitch and the PDF is created. What is the difference between these two functions and why does one work and the other not? Thanks in advance for any help.
there is alot of differences in these 2 options but to the naked eye they don't seem to much different but really there is a hell of alot different:-)
Basically, the Converting to pdf option uses a print engine called Adobe PDFMaker which is only available on microsoft application, using this option it create what i call a "Smart and intellligent" PDF, by this i mean that using this method lets you create a rich and interactive document by including bookmarks, multimedia content such as movies and flash media, hyperlinks, TOC etc
If you use the second option to create a PDF, which was the print command, what you are doing is bypassing the Great PDFMaker to create your PDFs and this methods uses distiller in the background to create a PDF, the downsides off this method is that it effectively creates a "Dumb PDF"! which does't include any of the bove methods, sometimes tho this could be a good or bad thing depending on the type of PDF you are creating. The other pro of the print command tho is that it creates a smaller file size.
With regards to the error warning you recieved, i saw the same warning on an individual workstation the i was teaching on today, but unfortunately someone else fixed it for me and i didn't see him how he correct the problem, if you are running another version of Acrobat on the same machine, that could have been the issue, so you could try reinstalling the programme, or remove the previos version from your computer if you no longer require it as this does correct some problems that do occur.
Hope all the above makes sense and is clear.