Adobe Acrobat Distiller is a

software application Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

for converting documents from

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

format to

Adobe PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

(Portable Document Format), the native format of the

Adobe Acrobat Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software and Web services developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The family comprises Acrobat Reader (formerly Reader), Acrobat (forme ...

family of products. It was first shipped as a component of Acrobat in 1993. Acrobat 4, in 1999, added preset configuration files to Distiller, and Acrobat 5, in 2001, added improved color management. Originally a separate application, Distiller eventually became incorporated into a

printer driver In computers, a printer driver or a print processor is a piece of software on a computer that converts the data to be printed to a format that a printer can understand. The purpose of printer drivers is to allow applications to do printing without ...

for creating PDF files that preserved the printed appearance of documents from other applications. A related Adobe product, Acrobat Distiller Server, was released in 2000 and provided the ability to perform high-volume conversion of PostScript to PDF formats through a centralized client-server architecture. In 2013, Distiller Server was discontinued in favor of the PDF Generator component of

Adobe LiveCycle Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES4) is a service-oriented architecture Java EE server software product from Adobe Systems used to build applications that automate a broad range of business processes for enterprises and government agencies. Li ...

.Adobe Distiller Server 8 / FAQ
, retrieved 2013-08-17.

References

Proprietary cross-platform software PDF software Adobe software {{linux-stub