Possible workaround for QuarkXpress not seeing Acrobat Distiller

Last week we noted that Quark Xpress 4.1.x and 5.0.x running in Classic mode under Mac OS X cannot directly use the Export to PDF commands that are available with the newly released Acrobat Distiller 6.

This solution is not thoroughly tested, so please let us know your results.

Perform a "Get Info" on the Mac OS X Distiller application, and show its package contents. Navigate to where the application resides in the package, usually Contents/MacOS/AppName. Make an alias of that item, which is the application residing in the package.

From QuarkXpress, instead of trying to choose the OS X distiller app, try pointing it to the alias created.

The original problem is that the first time you setup Xpress to use Distiller, you are required to find and identify the distiller application on your system. Unfortunately, as a Classic app, Quark cannot "see" the new Distiller 6.0 application package, which only runs under Mac OS X, as a usable version of Distiller.

UPDATE: MacFixIt reader Richard Cote offers another solution for getting Xpress documents into Distiller:

"I would suggest to those encountering the problem of Quark Xpress PDF plug-in not 'seeing' the Distiller 6.0 app to try writing their PS files to a temporary folder (maybe a watched folder) instead. To set this up in Quark 5.0, for example, go to Preferences > Application > PDF, and in the 'Workflow' options, select 'Create PostScript File for Later Distilling'. I've done this for years; preferring to have Distiller cue files for both reliability (especially under OS9) and speed, by keeping Distiller in the foreground during file processing. (Note this doesn't address a first-launch of Quark with the PDF plug-in.)

The chief difference with this method is that Quark won't trigger a launch of Distiller, or the processing of the particular file, but an open Distiller program can watch a folder just the same. It's also more efficient when preparing many PDFs to write all PS files first, and then run them through Distiller at once.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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