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Quick Fix – Manually Installing The Adobe PDF Printer for Acrobat 9

On occasion, when installing Adobe Acrobat 9 (as well as some other versions) the application will fail to install the “Adobe PDF” printer that typically resides in your Printers and Faxes folder in Windows XP.  This not only prevents Acrobat from creating any PDF files, but it also breaks the PDFMaker plugin functionality that gets added to Office when installing Acrobat.

The following instructions will help you restore the missing PDF printer:

#Open the Printers and Faxes dialog box and select Add a Printer
#Click Next then select Local printer attached to this computer, and deselect the Automatically detect and install my Plug and play printer box.  Click Next.
#In the port selection box, choose My Documents\*.pdf (Adobe PDF) and click Next.
#On the following screen, select Have Disk. Click Browse then navigate to the C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\Xtras\AdobePDF folder and highlight the AdobePDF.inf file.  Click Open, then OK.
#When presented with a list of Adobe PDF Converter options, select the first item from the list and click Next.
#When prompted for a printer name, change the value to Adobe PDF.  Naming it anything else will break the Office plugin functionality.
#Click Next through the remaining dialog boxes, selecting the appropriate options for your configuration as you go along.

At this point, the printer should be installed.  If the application is requesting files from your Windows CD, you will need to locate the proper files for your service pack level either by browsing on your computer or downloading then extracting the service pack executable.  This portion of the install varies by computer as I have had the install require these additional files about half the time.

If you are later prompted for the ADPDF9.PPD file, it can be found in the C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\Xtras\AdobePDF\StdPPD folder.

That should be it.  once you have finished the installation and provided Windows with the additional files if needed, you should be well on your way to creating PDFs!