Archive of posts tagged Adobe

Using epilogue.ps to set default Inital View settings in PDFs created with Adobe printer / Distiller

Posted by on

I’m using the Adobe printer or Distiller to create PDF documents. While you can set most PDF settings in the .joboptions file, there are a few things that I want that are not available:

  • I like the Initial View of the PDF to be
    • Page layout: Single Page
    • Magnification: Fit Page
      pdf_initial_view

To do that, I need to go open every PDF in Adobe Acrobat, and select File > Properties to change it. A very time-consuming, cumbersome task if you need to do that for a lot of files.
After a lot of googl’ing and trial-and-error, I finally managed to automate this by using pdfmark additions. pdfmarks are extensions to Postscript. These can be added to PDFs by adding them to the epilogue.ps file in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Distiller\Data and then creating a custom joboptions file that uses the updated epilogue.ps file (the default settings will not use the epilogue.ps file).

Setup

  1. Open %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Distiller\Data\epilogue.ps in a text editor
  2. After the line “‘% Insert your custom PostScript here”, add 
    [ /PageMode /UseNone /Page 1 /View [/Fit ] /DOCVIEW pdfmark
[ {Catalog} << /PageLayout /SinglePage >> /PUT pdfmark
  3. Save the epilogue.ps file
  4. Launch Distiller, select a joboption you want to use
  5. In Distiller, select Settings > Edit Adobe PDF Settings…
  6. Select Advanced, check “Use Prologue.ps and Epilogue.ps” option:
    distiller_advanced_epilogue
  7. Save As… to save the edited job option as a new one.
  8. In Windows, go to the Devices and Printers View, right-click the Adobe PDF printer and select Printer properties.
  9. Click Preferences… and select the .joboptions file as Default Settings:
    printer_preferences
  10. (Optional) Uncheck Delete log files for successful jobs if you want to look at the log file. It took me a while to find it, but on my Windows 10 machine, it was located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Adobe\Acrobat\Distiller 2015\messages.log

I found the initial information about pdfmark in this blog post. The link to the pdfmark Reference document no longer works, but you can find the pdfmark Reference on the Adobe Devnet site.

Getting rid of annoying context menu options

Posted by on

Some programs insist on adding items to the context menu. Most of the time, the installation program does not ask first whether I want that – mostly I don’t – and even more annoyingly, most programs also do not offer an easy way to turn off the integration into the right-click menu.

Luckily, there are tools that can help reducing the clutter to something meaningful, like Nirsoft’s excellent ShellMenuView and ShellExView
shellmenuview shexview.

Unforyunately, some companies make it very difficult to get rid of their additions. Adobe is really getting on my nerves, as it adds a variety of items that I don’t find useful, some of which I can’t even get rid of with the above mentioned tools from Nirsoft.

If you also want to keep a clean right-click menu in Windows Explorer, the below information might help:

  • To remove the Combine supported files in Acrobat context menu item:
    regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 10.0\Acrobat Elements\ContextMenu.dll"
    or for 64-bit Windows:
    regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 10.0\Acrobat Elements\ContextMenu64.dll"
  • To remove Outlook PDF Maker:
    regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 10.0\PDFMaker\Mail\Outlook\PDFMOutlook.dll"

Importing .VOB files into Adobe Premiere with audio

Posted by on

I had some video recordings in DVD format (MPEG2, .VOB-files) that I wanted to edit in Adobe Premiere CS3. Unfortunately, Adobe Premiere does not support .VOB files.
After renaming the .VOB files to .MPG, I could import them in Premiere, but the import only contained video, no audio. Some searching on the internet brought relief: apparently it’s as simple as copying a .DLL file from the Adobe Encore CS3 program files folder to the Adobe Premiere CS3 folder. The file you need is ad2ac3dec.dll.
I copied it, restarted Premiere, and indeed, the .MPG file imported nicely with audio.