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How do I...convert a text document using the font that *I* specify ???

TCSmith
Registered: Jul 8 2009
Posts: 2

I'm new to acrobat. ( We have v9. ) I have a 90mb text file ( report from our as/400 ) that I want to convert into a .pdf. I've actually done so, several times. But each time the .pdf file comes up displaying the contents, the font used is/was Arial.

I've changed the font in:

Edit -> Preferences -> New Document

to 'CourierNew'. I click on 'OK', then go back in, and Acrobat has changed my 'CourierNew' to 'CourierStd'.

Am I doing the correct thing? In the correct place? If not, could someone please tell me what to change, and where? It seems to me this shouldn't be so difficult, but so far...this ain't been easy...

Oh yeah, and I need to change 'portrait' to 'landscape', for this particular report.

Thanks in advance,

Tom

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.1.1, Windows
dthanna
ExpertTeam
Registered: Sep 28 2005
Posts: 248
TCSmith,

Does this report contain ASA Carriage control*? May I assume that you are generating a traditional 'green bar' (60-line 132-col, wide carriage) sort of beastie?

Old school: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASA_carriage_control_characters

To get from there to here, there are a couple of solutions - and only one uses Acrobat.

Options:
1) Google Text to PDF converters - you may find more than a few. Be warry of the PDF produced - especially if it will be digested by systems downstream.

2) Write one yourself - Use any one of several libraries to perform this. Adobe's through Datalogic, PDFlib or iText are ones I would recomend. The beauty of this is you can customize the output to suit your needs exactly. And you know you have a high-quality PDF being generated.

3) e-mail me. I have a PostScript preprocessor that I helped develop that can be prefixed onto any text/ASA Carriage Control document. Once done, you can Distill the resulting file to generate the necessary PDF. The code is 'AsIS' - but is fairly well commented.

I hope this helps.

Thanks.

-Doug

Douglas Hanna is a member of the Production Print Technology team at Aon.
www.aonhewitt.com