How to Fix: Microsoft Print to PDF (or Microsoft XPS Document Writer) Printer Not Working

How to Fix: Microsoft Print to PDF and Microsoft XPS Document Writer Printer Not Producing Output File

Symptoms: Print to PDF or Print-to-XPS Fails Silently, with no PDF File Created or no XPS File Created, in Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office

This Microsoft Windows and/or Microsoft Office bug (or Windows "Feature") drove me crazy for a bit of time — when I wanted to print a document or spreadsheet, I would choose Print, then select either "Microsoft Print to PDF" or "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" as my target printer, proceed with printing to a file, where I would be prompted for the filename and file-location (directory), and choose to "Save" the file, and, even though all indications were that printing was functioning correctly, no XPS or PDF file was created!

Maddening!  In the end, it turns out that actually, this appears to be an issue (or problem or bug or feature) with Microsoft Windows that has to do with how the Windows Printer Driver functions (or does not function or work in certain situations), in particular with some security settings that mess it up.  I was using Microsoft Windows 10 and Microsoft Office 2013 (running in a Vmware Virtual Machine — which I mention only because this bug also prevents printing documents to PDF or XPS files via Vmware's ThinPrint driver too).

This is my list of available printers, and the two virtual printers (print to PDF or XPS file) experiencing this problem printing to a file are highlighted with a green box:

Printers: including Microsoft Print to PDF and XPS Document Writer

The problem cause, and how to fix this printing problem...

This took some time to figure out, but the root-cause of this printing problem was file-system directory security settings. It turns out that both the Microsoft Print-to-PDF and Microsoft XPS Document Writer need appropriate permissions in your temporary directory.

I tend to redefine my default Microsoft Windows temporary directory to some easier-to-quickly-locate place, like, e.g., "C:\temp" or "C:\tmp" (vs. buried in their default user subdirectories).  It turns out that creating that non-standard / non-default temp-directory is what led to my particular problem with the PDF / XPS driver not working.

In Windows 10 (or Windows 7 or whatever), your temporary directory is defined under Control Panel, System Properties, Advanced, Environment Variables, User Variables / System Variables, with the Variables of "TEMP" and/or "TMP" pointing to your temporary directory of choice, and whereby I have remapped my temp dir to be "C:\temp" or whatever.  I never even considered that changing my temp directory could break my Windows Printing (to file) features!  But, it did!

So, how to fix the fact that PDF files and XPS files were acting like they were printing, but nothing is being generated, not even in the print-queue? Easy: set the permissions on your newly chosen temporary directory location as follows:

Here is what the default permissions on my custom temp directory looked like when the PDF and XPS files refused to print:

Default custom-temporary-directory permissions

Now, this is all it took to fix the problem — one simple check-mark (see green circle), changing the permissions on the temp directory:

That did it! Enabling Authenticated Users to have Full Control of the temporary-directory fixed the Microsoft XPS Document Writer and Microsoft Print to PDF feature.

It is hard to believe that a system-level print-driver needs some special permissions on a temp directory (the same directory all sorts of program installers and software update logs go into, etc.) in order to create a PDF or XPS temp file, but that seems to be the case.  And, without that permission, you click Print and nothing happens... no file is produced... no printing errors during the PDF / XPS production process, no indication of failure... just no file produced. Period.  Ughhh.  But, now I know. I hope this saves some readers a bit of time and frustration.

This issue was as crazy as the one that forced me to write a blog about How to Fix: "Unable to find Adobe PDF resource files" - Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions - in Acrobat Pro a while back.  Equally ridiculous.

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How to Fix: "Unable to find Adobe PDF resource files" - Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions- Acrobat Pro

Have you found yourself facing an Adobe Distiller (Adobe Acrobat Pro) error message something like this recently, when trying to print / output to a PDF file from a non-Adobe application on Windows?

"Unable to find Adobe PDF resource files" that mentions the directory "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Adobe PDF\Settings" and the supposed missing file "Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions"?

Well, I ran into this, and after searching the Internet for fixes, I found a whole lot of people talking in vagueness about how to "fix" this, to say the least, and providing little real information about how to fix the problem at hand (and, the advice produced zero resolution to the problem). Well, I figured it out myself, and I hope this information helps you.

Symptoms / Setup
First, I am using Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional (with 7.1 update), as was installed via the Adobe Creative Suite CS2 software, and on my Windows XP Professional desktop machine that has Service Pack 3 (SP3) installed. Producing PDF files was never a problem for me, until at some point (perhaps SP3?) it just stopped working, and every time I tried to produce a PDF from various applications, it would prompt me about "Do you want to run the installer in repair mode? ", to which I (foolishly, hopefully) said "yes" to, which of course does NOT fix anything. [note: I hate software like that!!! What is the point of a "repair mode" that does not repair the issue at hand?]

How to Fix / Resolve
Well, if you are "Unable to find Adobe PDF resource files" because your Acrobat Distiller can not find the file "C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Documents/Adobe PDF/Settings/Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions", let's get that file to exist!

It seems, from what I can tell, that Adobe Acrobat Distiller (i.e., the program that creates PDF files for you as a print-driver essentially), needs that EXACT NAMED FILE to exist, at that exact location. Never mind that you already have a "Standard.joboptions" file defined, and that logic would dictate SHOULD be used in the absence of the file "Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions"; you have to tell Acrobat 7.0 / 7.1 / 8.0 / etc that you really want that "standard" one to be used for performing conversions from certain non-Adobe applications that you are trying to "print a PDF from".

So, go to the folder mentioned: NOTE... THIS IS A HIDDEN FOLDER. So, to make things easy, presuming you installed on the "C:" drive, just copy and paste this following line to your Windows File-Explorer's address-bar, and you will go right to the folder, hidden or not:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Adobe PDF\Settings
Now, you should see other ".joboptions" files in that directory already, and presumably you do NOT have the "Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions" there, or you would not be getting this error message.

Choose whatever ".joboptions" file makes sense as your "default" for printing PDF files from your various Windows applications, and copy it to a file named,... you guessed it: "Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions" (in this same directory) I chose the "standard.joboptions" file, and copied it.

Now, try to print / generate a PDF from whatever application was otherwise having a bug or problem printing PDF files because of this pesky "Unable to find Adobe PDF resource files" Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions message and "run in repair mode?" not-a-fix option...

With luck, YOU CAN NOW PRINT A PDF from any application! (I sure hope so... it worked well for me!) What finally inspired me to FIX this issue on my desktop was when I was using the new VMware Workstation 7.0 feature called "Virtual Printer" which allows the guest VM's (virtual machines) to print to any installed host-printer (including, you guessed it, Adobe Acrobat / Distiller PDF printing!). Now I can print from ANY of my guest virtual-machines to an Adobe PDF file, using the host machine's installed Acrobat Professional 7.0 / 7.1, via a virtual-printer-passthrough mechanism. Sweeeeeet. But, this is a bit off topic aside from how cool it is!

Optional - Create your default PDF output-settings file first...
If you want to create a custom .joboptions file in this directory, just open up Acrobat Distiller, go to "Edit Adobe PDF Settings", and create a definition for however you want your default-output (when printing a PDF) to be, and "Save As..." whatever file name you desire. Then, copy THAT definition file to "Adobe PDF Converter.joboptions" in the directory I have been talking about here (which is where your new definition, by default, should have been saved during "save as" operation).

Final Thoughts...
From the types of web pages I was seeing when searching for a way to fix this "unable to find adobe pdf resource files" bug / feature, I noticed that it seems to occur with Acrobat Pro 7, Acrobat 7.1, Acrobat 8.0, and perhaps even Acrobat 9 (and Acrobat 6.0 ?).

So, hopefully this helps anyone trying to "solve the problem" on their machine with printing a PDF file and getting that darn message about running repair mode (which does nothing). If it helps, I would not mind a link to this page to promote a solution that really IS a solution (after all the time I wasted searching, and not finding one, I wish someone else would have promoted a real fix). Enjoy!

Software Bloat: Acrobat Reader Executable Size Growth over the years

Does this image say it all? Since I develop various software applications that, among other things, create reports in Adobe's Acrobat / PDF format, I tend to keep quite a few versions of Acrobat reader around for testing my program output with. And, I just could not help laughing when I looked at my file-server's Acrobat Reader executable programs directory, where, since 1997, I have accumulated versions of Acrobat Reader 3.2, 4.0, 5.0, 6.01, 7.05, 8.12, 9.0, and now the newest addition of Acrobat Reader 9.1

Check out the Software Bloat factor in Acrobat Reader over the years:


What started as a simple utility to display PDF files (Portable Document Format files from Adobe), has grown from an under 4Megabyte (MB) installation program to a whopping 42MB installation for Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.1 - which now includes things like Adobe Air and Acrobat.com and all sorts of other ridiculous crap.

I find this all crazy... how a PDF-Reader application can grown 10-TIMES in size (for the installer executable download) in a period of 12 years. Sure, it is no worse than Microsoft Windows or most other major applications that also seem to grow by orders of magnitude over the years, but why?

Is there really that much more functionality in the applications these days to justify this explosive file-size increase, or is it lazy software develoment, a lack of tuning, a lack of focus on clean and efficient code and re-use, or a combination of all the above? It is just hard to accept (for me) why a program designed to allow me to view PDF files on any computer must require a 40MB Download (I will not even get into how insanely large the post-installation size-requirements for this application are!).

I remember the days when I had an entire operating system (on a TRS-80) running in a mere 32K of RAM with simple word-processing programs, games, and the like. Sure, those programs were much simpler, and did not have modern GUI desktops and flash, but the entire OS AND PROGRAMS ran in 1/1000th the memory that this latest Acrobat Reader intallation program download is. Unreal.

This begs the question: what will Acrobat Reader 10 be like, or Acrobat Reader 11, or Acrobat Reader 12, or Acrobat Reader 13, or Acrobat Reader 14, etc... will we hit a ONE GIGABYTE download for their future PDF reader eventually? Given the history, file sizes have gone up to nearly 11-times their size in about the same number of years, and the version numbers at about 1 for every 2 years... so, in a decade, expect a 1/2-GB install of Acrobat Reader 14! It is coming! And, you will be using it (note: I use Acrobat Reader nearly daily; many people do)