Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter Shows as Network Printer

After you install Adobe Acrobat, the Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter icon in the Printers folder is unavailable. If you use the right mouse button to click this icon, Work Offline is selected on the menu that appears.

The Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter prints to a port named "Disk:." This is not a valid name for a local port in Windows 95. If a port name is not listed in the [Ports] section of the WIN.INI file, Windows 95 assumes the port is a network port. Therefore, Windows 95 assumes the PDFWriter is a network printer. Because this network port does not really exist, the printer is set to offline.

Use any text editor (such as Notepad) to edit the WIN.INI file. Add the following line to the [Ports] section of the file: After you add this line, save the WIN.INI file and close it, and then restart Windows 95.

The PDFWriter is part of Adobe Acrobat 2.0. It is a utility to convert PostScript files to a viewable format (Portable Document Format). This conversion is for cosmetic purposes only; the functionality of the program is not affected when this symptom occurs.

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