I've had trouble creating documents from time to time and have finally discovered that the problem is related to periods being in the title. I often see this when printing from Adobe Reader to the PDFCreator but have also seen it with a few other random programs. Normally printing to PDFCreator works fine, so I never investigated this problem too much, I always assumed some weird incompatibility between the two programs. I've seen this behavior on different versions of PDFCreator, including but not limited to 1.2.0 and 1.3.2. Now that I know the cause is periods in the title, I set out to solve the problem.
In PDFCreator -> Options -> Program -> Save, I have added a "Filename substitution" and now substitute a period "." for an underscore "_". This now allows me to print to the PDFCreator printer without issue from these "troubled" programs.
I handle application deployement on my employers systems. To set this globally by default, I'm using the /REGFile installer switch and am populating this key (amoung others) in the registry file. Setting this in HKLM does populate the change down to the user level on our systems.
thank you for pointing this out, could you tell us what happened when there was a period in the title without the workarround? Was no file created, or where parts of the filename/title missing?
The PDFCreator.exe consumes near 100% CPU and does not create a PDF. This happens between the steps of pressing Save (the title/info screen) and the pop-up that happens where you select the location and filename (Save As screen).
Eventually errors pop up on the screen, I don't recall exactly what they say, but I believe it is something about memory corruption or out of memory. Also, when this happens, the PDFCreator screens go partially unresponsive and "grey out", so it is difficult to see what is happening.
Sure, any title that contains a . in the name exhibits this problem.
Here are some steps to reproduce:
Open the PDFCreator Printer in Windows Printers and print a Test Page. Save the PDF using default settings (on my machine it names the PDF "Test Page" and then after clicking "save" the PDF opens in Adobe Reader). In Adobe Reader, print the test page to the PDFCreator Printer. (without my fix above) The title is now shown as "Test Page.pdf". Pressing Save results in the PDFCreator.exe process consuming near 100% CPU and must be killed in task manager. Also after many seconds, a partially corrupted error pops up and says "The folder could not be found. Right-click the icon, click Properties, and then check that the path to your target folder location is correct." Printing the exact same PDF and manually removing the period in the Title does not produce this issue.
This is not limited to Adobe Reader, I'm using it as an example. Any program that makes the title of the print job include a period in the title like my example has this problem.
I am seeing this on Windows XP SP3 machine. I'm unsure of any other Windows versions.
I have screenshots, but do not see a way to upload them to this forum.