Can't print to Adobe PDF 7.0 on Mac OS, is it still supported?

Question

I use Adobe Acrobat Standard 7.0 on a PC running XP SP3 to create large format PDFs from JPEGs and TIF images; it works great for creating PDFs from technical drawings, etc. simply by "printing" to the Adobe printer from most any application.
To the point of this post, I also have Adobe Acrobat Pro 7.0 on a Mac running OS 10.5.6. While the Acrobat Pro software does its thing ok to merge PDF files and images to create a new file from within Acrobat, however, for the life of me, I can't get the Mac to actually print from another application to the Adobe PDF 7.0 printer (e.g. even from Photoshop or Illustrator which should be about as compatible applications as there could be for use with Acrobat)
On the Mac, Adobe PDF 7.0 shows up as a choice for a printer and allows all sorts of page output size and quality choices, (just as it does on the Windows version), however, nothing actually happens when I hit "print", the printer status window shows it as being "paused", but nothing can be done to "unpause" it, hitting "resume printer" generates the error message "Operation Could not be completed ... client-error-not-possible". I have updated to the latest revisions available for this 7.0 version of Acrobat Pro, but no luck.
Since I see similar comments / questions for later versions of Acrobat for Mac,  think that this issue must be something about the Mac OS and the Adobe printer settings not "playing nice" with each other.
It really irks me to need go over to the PC to do something the Mac can't finish ... Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated ... Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

According to Adobe's support document on compatibility with Leopard:
http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/leopardsupport.pdf
Acrobat 8 "Requires update to v8.1.2 for full compatibility with Leopard."
As for Acrobat 7:
"While older Adobe applications may install and run on Mac OS X Leopard, they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may, therefore, experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution."
The fix described above may solve the problem in the short term -- which is likely caused by improvements to security in Leopard that make it harder for processes to write files to disk.
If you're using Photoshop and Illustrator, then you can save the file directly as a PDF. No need to print to PDF. (Though of course, if you're using CS2, there may well be other problems with PS and AI on 10.5.)
You may be interested to learn that even in Acrobat 9 on Snow Leopard, the Adobe PDF print queue is completely deprecated, and you have to use a "Save As Adobe PDF" option under the PDF button in the print menu.
There are of course ways round this. I use a CUPS backend that saves PostScript to a folder that Distiller watches. However, the ability of the print system to write files to the user spaces has been tightened up even more in 10.6.
The final point worth making is that you really should apply the system update to 10.5.8. There is absolutely no reason not to, and lots of reasons why you should. 10.5.7 contains lots of improvements to the reliability and stability of your system, for starters. Including improvements to the printing system.