Creating PS file with Adobe PDF very slow

Question

Hallo Framers,
I use FrameMaker 7.1 and Distiller 8.1.3 under Windows XP.
As recommended in many posts on this forum, I have set Adobe PDF as my default printer. I use the Print To File setting and process the resulting PS with Distiller. However it is S-L-O-W. Making the PS of a 1250-page document takes less than 2 minutes when I use the driver of my PS printer (Xerox WorkCentre 7132PS), and 48 minutes using the Adobe PDF driver. The PS and PDF files are about the same size (900MB PS, 14MB PDF) and the appearance and links seem to be good in both.
I know that Tagged PDF can be slow, but I have switched that off in Format > Document > PDF Setup > Tags. Are there any other settings where I can speed up the Adobe PDF?
aTdHvAaNnKcSe (thanks in advance)
--- Derek

Answer 1

Since my name has been used in vain here at least a few times ...
(1)     My presentation from 2002 is somewhat dated. Acrobat 5 is four releases back from Acrobat 9, the current release. Likewise, the current FrameMaker at that time was FrameMaker 7.0, also four releases back from the current FrameMaker 9 (I am counting 7.1 and 7.2 as releases). Some of the recommendations from that 2002 still make sense and apply, others don't.
(2)     For example, there is the issue of the spooling settings for the Advanced tab of the Adobe PDF PostScript Printer Driver Instance. Ideally, this should be set to Start printing after last page is spooled. But if you set that option for that particular printer instance under Windows Vista or Windows 7, you break Acrobat (it is a security “feature” added by Microsoft). Leave the setting at the default of Start printing immediately if you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 (which of course implies that you must have Acrobat 8 or Acrobat 9).
(3)     The glacial speed issue is really associated with the fact that there are a number of “layers” of code interpreting each of the calls made by FrameMaker to Windows GDI to pass not only graphics to the driver to be converted to PDF, but many fragments of PostScript for purposes of providing support for reflow, structure, links, etc. If you turn off those features you really don't need for a particular publication, you will likely see significant performance improvements. Alternatively, something that essentially saves just to file without going through the driver plug-in directly feeding the Distiller may also cut the overhead.
(4)     There is no new printer driver dated from 2002 or otherwise on the Adobe website. I assume the reference is to the Adobe Universal PostScript Windows Driver Installer 1.0.6 dating back to 5/23/2002. First thing to know about this “installer” is that it won't run properly and may crash on Windows Vista and Windows 7 32-bit systems and won't run at all on 64-bit Windows systems. It is a 16-bit installer application that was originally designed for Windows'95 and Windows'98. The second and most important thing to understand is that it doesn't install any new driver on any OS versions other than Windows'9X, Windows ME, and Windows NT 4.0. For Windows 2000 and XP, it uses the existing Windows PSCRIPT5 driver and associates that with a PPD file to create a PostScript printer driver instance. Again, it installs nothing new. What you can do with this is to create a new PostScript printer driver instance using the Distiller PPD and set it to print to FILE: using that to create PostScript from FrameMaker and then funnel either manually or via a “watched folder” to the Distiller for creation of PDF from the PostScript.
          - Dov