Acrobat conflicts with Word

[Andrew B.]

We are having a problem with Acrobat killing Word on a couple of Windows computer. I found a suggested fix on the Internet that requires removing the PDF Maker gizmo that adds a button to the tool bar. But I'm wondering if anyone else knows more about this.

[Michael Rowley]

Andrew:

Acrobat killing Word on a couple of Windows computers

I never had any problems with Acrobat 5 or 6 (I haven't tried 7) with Word 2000 or 2003, but mine is a stand-alone computer: there might be problems with networks, perhaps. Try removing makepdf.dot from the start-up file, because it's the only connexion between Acrobat and Word that I know of.

[annc]

We are having a problem with Acrobat killing Word on a couple of Windows computer. I found a suggested fix on the Internet that requires removing the PDF Maker gizmo that adds a button to the tool bar. But I'm wondering if anyone else knows more about this.FWIW, I've never been able to successfully create a PDF from Word X (Mac) with the Acrobat Pro 6 toolbar tool. The progress bar gets almost to the end, then sits there indefinitely. The only recourse is to force-quit Word.

However, printing to the installed Adobe PDF printer works well, and quickly.

[Michael Rowley]

Anne:

The progress bar gets almost to the end, then sits there indefinitely

You have to wait some time in Word for Windows until the PDF is finished, and the screen changes are most alarming, but Adobe gets there in the end. It just needs lots of patience. Perhaps it's faster with a super-duper computer.

But that doesn't appear to be Andrew's problem, because even if makepdf.dot doesn't work in your case, it shouldn't interfere with Word.

[Andrew B.]

Thanks. I'll look into that.

[Steve Rindsberg]

A couple things to watch out for:

If the printer driver's set to make a file rather than print, everything goes pearshaped when you use PDFMaker. OTOH, it'd probably do the same when printing directly to the Adobe PDF driver.

ISTR one Windows version used to occasionally toss up a message box asking for a yes/no answer, but it'd disappear immediately behind the app or a progress dialog so you couldn't see it. Until you saw it and clicked an answer, nothing was going to happen.

Might try moving things around to see if you can unearth something of that nature.

[annc]

You have to wait some time in Word for Windows until the PDF is finished, and the screen changes are most alarming, but Adobe gets there in the end. It just needs lots of patience. Perhaps it's faster with a super-duper computer.I left it for four hours once, just to see what would happen. It definitely doesn't work.

[annc]

A couple things to watch out for:

If the printer driver's set to make a file rather than print, everything goes pearshaped when you use PDFMaker. OTOH, it'd probably do the same when printing directly to the Adobe PDF driver.

ISTR one Windows version used to occasionally toss up a message box asking for a yes/no answer, but it'd disappear immediately behind the app or a progress dialog so you couldn't see it. Until you saw it and clicked an answer, nothing was going to happen.

Might try moving things around to see if you can unearth something of that nature.I've sat and watched it often enough to feel pretty certain that it isn't the disappearing dialogue box, Steve. After all, when something's only going to take a few seconds, and you need to do something with the result, it's often the case that you'll sit and watch.

The Word files I do that with are all from PC users, btw. I don't do Word myself, prefering to use InDesign and export to PDF when I feel the urge to share with other people.

Of course, my version of Word is about three years old, and definitely older than Acrobat 6 Pro. I'm happy enough with the workaround, and have never bothered to pursue a solution on the Adobe forums. Just thought it was worth mentioning here.

[Michael Rowley]

Anne:

I left it for four hours once

I reckon on up to 10 min now, but when I first tried it I decided that it wasn't working after about 5 min seeing nothing apparently happening; but 4 h seems excessive!

You did, of course, turn off Word's security setting that prevents (in Windows) macros' working.

[Michael Rowley]

Anne:

my version of Word is about three years old

Acrobat 5 was, I think, the first version that included PDFMaker.dot, and it worked all right with Word 9 (2000).

PDFMaker.dot does invoke Distiller of course, but it gives you an opportunity to make all the settings you want. A lot of the time is actually spent getting Distiller loaded and then Acrobat.

[Michael Rowley]

Andrew:

Try removing makepdf.dot

I hope you're not looking for that (in vain), because the file is actually PDFMaker.dot. It's in C:\program files\. . .\Office 11\Start up in my set-up.

[annc]

You did, of course, turn off Word's security setting that prevents (in Windows) macros' working.?No such animal in Word X. I can turn off a dialogue box that warns me of the presence of Macros, but that only affects opening documents from other sources. The failure of the Acrobat tool happens with all types of Word documents.

[annc]

Acrobat 5 was, I think, the first version that included PDFMaker.dot, and it worked all right with Word 9 (2000).

PDFMaker.dot does invoke Distiller of course, but it gives you an opportunity to make all the settings you want. A lot of the time is actually spent getting Distiller loaded and then Acrobat.I didn't have any version of Word between version 3.1 and Word X, for reasons I've mentioned here many times before. <g>

It's interesting that Sherlock shows I have two versiions: pdfMaker.dot which resides in my Acrobat 5 folder, and PDFMaker.dot which resides in [drivename]:Microsoft Office X:Office X:Startup:Word

Next time I restart the Mac, maybe I'll rename the Acrobat 5 version and see what happens.

[Michael Rowley]

Anne:

?No such animal in Word X

Oh. I don't know whether 'Word X' (which I assume is the Mac equivalent of Word 10—or 'XP') has the present choices that Word 11 ('2003') has, viz stop all macros, give a warning that the document includes macros, or allow all macros. Since the only documents to include macros are usually my own, I have chosen 'allow all'. But if I were to choose 'allow none', presumably the macro in PDFMaker.dot wouldn't be allowed to run either; the source of the macro doesn't affect the issue.

It rather surprises me that Mac Word is different, since I assume that it has VBA. Even the legendary resistance of the Mac OSs to attack ought to make it susceptible to VBA malevolently used I should have thought. But I'm not a user of Acrobat and Mac Word.

[Michael Rowley]

Anne:

It's interesting that Sherlock shows I have two versiions: pdfMaker.dot . . .

That is so on my set-up too: you could delete the copy of PDFMaker.dot from your (Word) start-up folder. That would make the add-in unavailable unless you deliberately loaded it during a session of Word; only if the dot-file is in your start-up directory is it loaded automatically when you start Word—but I expect you know that.

My copy of PDFMaker.dot (in my start-up folder) loads, but is immediately negated because I accidentally removed the menu 'Adobe PDF' from my toolbar (I'd got PDFMaker 5 and 6 on the toolbar and removed the one that worked!), and now my normal.dot permamently has the direction to remove it.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Even if WordX had macro protection as in Word/Windows it wouldn't produce this particular symptom, I don't think. If macro security were set to high, PDFMaker wouldn't function at all.

Security in Office/Mac is on approximately the same level as Office 97 under Windows (there's a Macro Virus protection checkmark in the General section of Preferences, Ann). You get a warning when you open a document that contains macros if that's enabled, but you can't disable installed add-ins. PDFMaker is an Addin, I'm pretty sure ... don't have it on the Mac so I can't check. Ann ... what do you see listed in Tools, Addins and Templates?)

But Mac Word certainly has VBA and has since Office 98. And absolutely, a malicious VBA macro could do all manner of damage. Less under OSX than under Windows, unless the Mac user's silly enough to be running under an administrator or root account, in which case they (and programs ... our malwareVBA for example) running under their account could destroy anything.

But even under OS/X, if you allow me to run VBA, I can wipe out all of your files, for example. But then that's true of any program you allow to run. Trust but verify.

[Michael Rowley]

Steve:

you can't disable installed add-ins

The add-ins Acrobat provides are simply templates containing on or more macros. Perhaps Word does have a way of preventing macros that are not in add-ins separately from all those that are and loaded): VBA has an add-in manager, but PDFMaker.dot isn't listed there, nor, for that matter, are any of the other add-ins that I have.

Anne's trouble might be a damaged copy of PDFMaker.dot, if it's not a badly written one that calls for something that Mac OS 10 doesn't do.

[Andrew B.]

I hope you're not looking for that (in vain), because the file is actually PDFMaker.dot. It's in C:\program files\. . .\Office 11\Start up in my set-up.No wonder I couldn't find it. But that's okay. I told them to uninstall Acrobat and reinstall it, but to leave out the helper buttons this time. They told me this solved the problem.

[Michael Rowley]

Andrew:

No wonder I couldn't find it

Sorry I misled you. The template is PDFMaker.dot but the main macro it contains is simply called ConvertToPDF.

If the template isn't loaded automatically (because it's not in the start-up folder) it can be loaded during a session from the Adobe folder that it's put in when it's istalled.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Steve:

you can't disable installed add-ins

The add-ins Acrobat provides are simply templates containing on or more macros. Perhaps Word does have a way of preventing macros that are not in add-ins separately from all those that are and loaded): VBA has an add-in manager, but PDFMaker.dot isn't listed there, nor, for that matter, are any of the other add-ins that I have.

Anne's trouble might be a damaged copy of PDFMaker.dot, if it's not a badly written one that calls for something that Mac OS 10 doesn't do.
I put that badly (and it's even fishier when removed from the water of its context).

Version 1.1 The Macro Security feature in Office/Mac doesn't allow you to disable vba code in installed templates and addins (the security features in Office 2000 and up/Windows do give you more control over this). In any case, the notion is that if you've installed an addin or template containing code, presumably it's because you'd like the code to run. Else why bother? So in general, you don't want the security feature barking at your already-installed addins. You do, as a rule, want it to attack the ankles of vba code in documents you open normally.

The Templates and Addins manager in Word probably doesn't show all of the "containers" of code that might be loaded currently. I don't work in Word vba much and when I do it's only to modify code that one of my clients has written already, but in at least one other Office app, code loaded from one section of the registry appears in the add-in manager; code loaded from another doesn't. And COM addins don't appear there at all.

[Michael Rowley]

Steve:

code loaded from one section of the registry appears in the add-in manager

I don't know anything about the add-in manager, but I haven't found that it manages anything that I've got, possibly because they all are templates and are loaded in the 'old' way, which dates from Word Basic times, i.e. via 'Templates and Add-ins'.

I'm off to see if 'VBA Help' adds more information about what VBA reckons is an add-in

[Andrew B.]

Thanks for the additional information. This is helpful to know, in case we run into another problem.

Also, I think I need to take a closer look at what these buttons can do. IOW, do they add anything beyond simply printing to Distiller.

[Michael Rowley]

Andrew:

do they add anything beyond simply printing to Distiller

I'm not sure if you're talking about the menus or the buttons on the Adobe toolbar in Word. The menu gives you four options, one of which is to set the options (for Distiller) and one of which is to go ahead, i.e. make the PDF & print to the Adobe 'printer'; the other two are to make the PDF etc. & close down or e-mail it somewhere.

You can set all the Distiller options, name the PDF, make the PDF, and open Acrobat (to see how the PDF looks), all without leaving Word or having to worry about the Adobe settings, which is rather convenient.

You can also make the PDF by just presssing the button on the Adobe toolbar (if it's visible), but then you can't adjust the settings first.

[Andrew B.]

I had a chance to take a look this morning, and I see the features there. I guess I should have looked before. One thing though. Adobe is not using pdfmaker.dot anymore. Doing a hard disk search turns up no such file on my computer. I also see no signs of this when I look for in the Visual Basic tools or add-in tools in the various Office applications. But searching my hard disk turns up dll files with the same or similar names.

[Michael Rowley]

Andrew:

Adobe is not using pdfmaker.dot anymore

That would be Acrobat 7, wouldn't it? PDFMaker 5 & 6 were simply Word templates, but Adobe may have a different way of making Word documents into PDFs; it is not likely that it has abandoned the idea.

[Steve Rindsberg]

PDFMaker may have been rewritten as a COM addin, which wouldn't be visible in the VBA IDE at all.

[Michael Rowley]

Steve:

PDFMaker may have been rewritten as a COM addin

I've checked the Acrobat comparison table that gives information about the various goodies in the different v. 7 programs, and continued one-button PDF-making is available for Word, Powerpoint, and Excel in Acrobat 7 Srandard; but several other programs get the one-button treatment in the Professional.

There should be a separate list of COMAddIns in VBA (says VBA Help), but I've not found it.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Word 2003's help seems to have a number of problems re COM addins.
None of the sample VBA code works in Word or Excel, though it's fine in PowerPoint.

As to the list Help refers to, choose Tools, Customize. Click the Commands tab then click "Tools" in the left listbox. "COM Addins" will be one of the choices in the listbox on the right then. Drag it to any convenient toolbar then click Close.

Now you can click the newly added button to view a list of your COM addins.

[Michael Rowley]

Steve:

Now you can click the newly added button to view a list of your COM addins

As it happens, I found the place yesterday. I also found an MS paper on dealing with problems with add-ins. Could Acrobat be using WLLs, or is that old-hat? It's the other alternative to macros in VBA.

[Steve Rindsberg]

WLLs are (I'm fairly sure) Word Basic, the predecessor to VBA. Adobe's PDFMaker has always been a combination of VBA + DLL (which may have been COM addin) since it released in Acrobat 3.

I'd bet large amounts of money that WLL's out, if only I could find anyone to bet against me.

[Michael Rowley]

Steve:

I'd bet large amounts of money that WLL's are out

I wouldn't bet too large amount, since Microsoft still lists WLLs as possible add-ins. I don't think they were actually Word Basic, which goes back to Word (for Windows) 1, but they certainly worked with it. They could do things that Word Basic couldn't.

[Steve Rindsberg]

Steve:

I'd bet large amounts of money that WLL's are out

I wouldn't bet too large amount, since Microsoft still lists WLLs as possible add-ins. I don't think they were actually Word Basic, which goes back to Word (for Windows) 1, but they certainly worked with it. They could do things that Word Basic couldn't.
You're right, WLLs are not Word Basic, but I still think it's a safe bet that Adobe isn't using them.