Acrobat Distiller 5 hangs when printing from RPM

Q: When using a filter action to call Acrobat Distiller, the first job is distilled properly. Subsequent jobs fail to be opened in Distiller and stay in RPM Remote Print Manager® (“RPM”) in a Wait state.

A: A new feature introduced in version 5.0, and has been available in all versions since, has an option to forcibly close a filter program launched by RPM after a configurable idle timeout period. By default, the program will be closed if idle for ten seconds. Because RPM ensures the program must be idle for that amount of time before closing it, the value can be safely set to a much lower threshold.  We had an Adobe program in mind when we added this.

Acrobat Distiller has some command line switches that were unavailable or not required in previous Distiller versions. Distiller should be called similar to the following example:

	x:\path\to\acrodist.exe /N /Q filename

• The /N option tells Distiller to start a new instance which assures that it will be started fresh and will not try to wait for previous Distiller instances to finish processing.
• The /Q option is supposed to cause Distiller to quit when it is finished processing a file, though it will not close if it is the only remaining instance of Distiller.

For more command-line switches in Distiller, refer to www.adobe.com.