Acrobat and Distiller; is Postscript Driver necessary?

Question

Hi. I'm using Adobe Technical Communications Suite (TCS), which includes FrameMaker 8 and Acrobat 8 3D. This is a more general Acrobat question, which is why I'm not posting in the 3D forum.
Where I work, there are are some long-standing procedures for installing and using software. A lot of these procedures go back many years and are not always kept up to date, or are not always examined very closely.
The procedure for installing and using FrameMaker and Acrobat includes a step for installing the generic Postscript printer driver (winsteng.exe). Then, you set up the Postscript driver to use Acrobat Distiller as its PPD.
But here's the thing: I set up a new system with a fresh install of TCS and skipped the whole Postscript driver thing. Didn't bother with it at all. And when I test FrameMaker and Acrobat everything works fine. I "Save as PDF," have access to all the same Distiller configurations, and create a perfectly good PDF with all components, fonts, and colors intact.
That begs the question of WHAT IS THE POINT of installing the Postscript driver? (Especially if it just points back to Distiller as the PPD...)
Can I safely assume that this whole Postscript driver is a hold over from long ago, when perhaps it was necessary? Or is there something I'm not aware of; some flaw or risk of making PDFs without the Postscript driver?
BTW, it's a WinXP environment, and we ship both PDFs and printed docs to the customer. Docs are printed in-house. I will test a non-Postscript PDF with the in-house printer, but in the meantime, are there any Postscript whiz kids here who can enlighten me?
Thanks!

Answer 1

A few things are a bit unclear. Sorry for all the ">" stuff, but it's the best way to keep track:
>>The fonts are not Zipped. Helvetica seems to be installed normally in WINDOWS/FONTS
> How can you tell, given that, as I said, you can't check this with
Windows Explorer? And especially, given that it doesn't show up on a
search.
I'm not sure what you mean. When I look in the WINDOWS/FONTS folder, I see the Helvetica fonts, both the font names and the file names. I agree that the Fonts folder doesn't show you everything in the folder, but this isn't an issue of something NOT being there; with Helvetica it IS there. So what do you mean by "can't check this with Windows Explorer?" I'm looking right at it.
However, I said that Zapf Dingbats was NOT in the WINDOWS/FONTS folder, and I was wrong; it's not visible (due to the reasons you're talking about) but when I do a search on the font's file name, the file is located in the WINDOWS/FONTS folder. (I don't know why you say it doesn't show up on a search...)
So what we have is that Helvetica at least APPEARS to be correctly installed, and Zapf Dingbats appears to NOT be correctly installed (because if it was correctly installed, it would show up in Explorer... Or so I surmise.)
>> I don't know how to install them elsewhere.
> When you install a font, you have the choice to select "copy font" or not.
OK, after writing a long paragraph about how your answer doesn't address the question, I realized there's a big disconnect here, on my part. I've always interpreted "Copy Fonts to Fonts Folder" as meaning "copy the fonts from the source to the local machine, versus leaving them on the source, which could be a CD or network location." In other words, I thought it was about copying vs. not copying. I didn't realize it was referring to the specific LOCATION. Thanks Microsoft. Grrrr!
WAIT! After writing that, I deleted the Zapf Dingbat files from WINDOWS/FONTS with the intention of reinstalling them elsewhere. So I clicked "Install New Fonts," turned OFF "Copy Fonts to Fonts Folder," and clicked OK, expecting to be prompted for a location.
No. It started installing (where? who knows?) and then came back with the following error message from the Windows Fonts Folder: "The copyright holder of the "Zapf Dingbats" font will not allow their font to be converted to TrueType. Please contact the font vendor for more information."
Um. (a) So I still don't know how to install to a location other than WINDOWS/FONTS, and (b) what's all this "convert to TrueType" stuff? I never asked for that. I just want to install it as-is, as a Type 1!
> Right, now we seem to be on to something. This doesn't seem like
anything to do with whether it can find the font. Distiller does NOT
make decisions like this. It suggests something at a higher level has
made the substitution before writing the PostScript file.
But what? Any ideas? Anyone?
>>One possibility is that perhaps my fonts are not licensed or whatever.
> No, you'd get specific errors.
That's what I would expect. But keep in mind that I don't know the origin or history of these fonts. They're just being tossed around amongst the people I work with. I don't know if there are any kind of DRM issues or whatever.