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PDFX is not included in the standard A-Shell release; it is an optional product that is licensed and purchased separately from A-Shell. Both AshLPD and ATE (A-Shell Terminal Emulator) are likewise not included with A-Shell, but rather are sold and licensed separately.

While PDFX directives originate in A-Shell, they are executed by a special printer driver than runs on a PC. The drivers must be installed on each PC where the PDF generation process takes place, except in the case of Terminal Server, where the driver is installed on the server. These drivers, along with an installation program that may be run in either normal Windows fashion or via a command line, are provided by MicroSabio when the PDFX package is purchased.

Note that all of the options provided by the //PDFX interface are native characteristics of the PDF specification and generation process, which means that they are all documented and explained in Adobe's documentation for Acrobat. If the information on the //PDFX directives does not provide all of the depth or explanation that you need, consult the Acrobat help file and/or other Adobe Acrobat information resources.

u GDI Directives versus Default Settings

The driver provides a default value for every possible PDFX setting. So you don’t need to specify a value for every property. In fact, you can create a PDF by printing a plain text file to the driver, with no //PDFX or other GDI directives in it. (The default behavior is to prompt you with the Save As dialog and then launch the default PDF viewer.)

If you want to change the defaults, the easiest way to do this is by adding the necessary settings to the printer init file. (For settings that do not have an associated printer init file option, you can use the PREFIX option to specify a document containing GDI and PDFX directives that will be supplied at the start of each document (overriding the built-in defaults). This is of course much simpler than adding the directives to manually to every print file. And compared to modifying the defaults in the driver’s preferences dialog, it has the following advantages:

•It allows you to have different sets of defaults (simply by creating different printer init files).
•The driver’s preferences dialog is mainly designed for use in the retail version of the driver with non-PDFX-aware applications; the properties set there do not necessarily apply to the API interface (which A-Shell/PDFX uses). Setting the properties explicitly in the printer init and/or prefix files eliminates any ambiguity.