About Justin VanAlstyne Expertise I have a full working knowledge of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 - 7.01. I have experience in creating interactive PDFs, embedding multimedia, web-based forms, creating presentations using PDF, advanced prepress preparation, PDF web optimization, color management, and using PDF as a soft-proofing tool. I do not have a lot of experience using Acrobat`s advanced Javascripting features, though a lot of custom functionality can be built into a PDF this way.
Experience
Past/Present clients Marsh, Inc. (http://www.marsh.com), Impel Corp (http://www.impelcorp.com), Home Properties (http://www.homeproperties.com)
Question my wife was having trouble printing large text files [problem - the format of the printed text was changed from the format of the text as viewed in wordprocessor] - she uses Corel Wordperfect software. We asked a question on allexperts and answer was that Corel did not like large files and that adobe would freeze the format if we would save the file as a PDF file. She has had success on several small files but the big files refuse to be saved in adobe. Message is "file damaged -cannot be repaired". These files are printable and my wife does print them in Corel but has to continually change the format errors. The files are not damaged to my knowledge.
Any ideas?
Answer Jim-
The first thing, is that if what you print from Corel is different than what is on the screen (I assume you mean slightly reflowed text, anything more than that, like colors, fonts, etc would definately point to a problem with Corel), printing to a PDF will likely capture the same thing.
The fact that she can PDF smaller text files leads me to believe that perhaps some physical aspect of your computer is the problem. How much RAM do you have? How large are these text files? Adobe Acrobat should be able to handle files upwards of several hundred megabytes (with proper computer hardware) without much of a problem.
If this is not the problem, perhaps Corel is at fault (as previously suggested), or perhaps you are using an out-of-date version. It is interesting that she can print the large files directly from Corel, but cannot print them to the Adobe PDF print driver. What version of Acrobat is she using, and how is she trying to create the PDFs from Corel?
Is there a possibility she can temporarily copy (or export to another file format) one of these large text files into another word processing program like MS Word or a text editor? Not to have her reformat the text, but just to test to see if that program will create a proper PDF, or print directly without problems.
If none of this seems to shed any light on the problem, it could just be due to out-dated software and hardware. What OS are you running, how old is the machine, etc.? I have found that older software and hardware just slowly seem to stop behaving how these used to. Unanswerable problems or quirks on older machine vanish when up-to-date software and hardware are brought in.
