🚀 go-pugleaf

Vicky,

Do you have Acrobat installed in a location other than C:\Program
Files\Adobe\..... or are you using the PDFMaker that came with FM? If
you have Acrobat, can you run the PDFMaker utility in other
applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. ?

Also, have you installed all of the FM 8.0 patches in order?

In my particular case, I found that the Acrobat installer messes up
some Registry entries that FM (and MS Office products) looks at to try
to find the Adobe PDF printer instance. If FM can't find it from the
Registry info, it simply gives up and throws the error message that
you're getting (without asking you where it might actually be - bad
implementation, IMHO).

I had installed my Acrobat to drive D: and had the same "FrameMaker
could not find Adobe PDF printer instance, which must be installed to
execute Save as PDF command" error message. After making the Registry
entry changes, FM could find the Adobe PDF printer instance once again
and I could a Save As PDF properly.

If you're comfortable using Regedit, you could try fixing this as
follows (Warning: you can mess things up if you don't know what you're
doing!):

1. First make a System Restore point before going any further and also
make a backup copy of the Registry (File > Export... ; Note: it's
going to be very a big file!).

2. In the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe section look for the
Acrobat Distiller entry for InstallPath. Make sure that it's pointing
to where acrodist.exe actually is installed on your machine.

3. In the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFWARE\Adobe\Acrobat Distiller\8.0
section, also check the InstallPath entry and correct as required.
Then check the lower-level \InstallPath entry to make sure that this
also matches. Now check the PrinterName entry in the same section to
make sure that it is "Adobe PDF".

4. Now (in the same section) look in the \Adobe\Acrobat PDFMaker\8.0
branch at the Path parameter to make sure that it's pointing to your
Acrobat installation's actual \PDFMaker folder.

5. Now check the \Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\8.0 section entries to make sure
that any paths listed in any of the entries and sub-entries there
point to the actual locations of the files (Keep your file explorer
utility open and actually check to see if those files are there).

Alternatively, you could try uninstalling Acrobat and re-installing it
(preferably on drive C:).

You may need to re-boot your machine after the edits, but in my case
it worked without a re-boot.

Your mileage may vary and this might not be the solution for
particular problem.