I have an application written in VFP 6.0, SP3, running on Windows NT.
Our application allows the user to output ther report in .PDF files, and also to e-mail these reports. We've been using Adobe Acrobat 3.02, and it's worked fine. However, some of our customers (as well as our internal users) are installing Acrobat 4. Now the code no longer works properly. Here is the "meat and potatoes" of the code, before any code changes. For clarity:
tcPrinter is the printer destination. In this case is is "Acrobat PDFWriter"
tcOutputDestination is the filename we are using to store the output (typical contents would be "FILE: c:\temp\12345678.pdf"). This file is then sent as an attachment to an e-mail message.


IF .NOT. EMPTY(tcPrinter) .AND. .NOT. 'DEFAULT' $ tcPrinter
SET PRINTER TO NAME (tcPrinter)
ELSE
SET PRINTER TO DEFAULT
ENDIF

** For some reason, when we are using Acrobat on Windows NT, we need to set the print output to the printer rather than to a file.
** this problem does not occur on Win95 or Win98.
IF 'WINDOWS NT' $ UPPER(OS()) AND "ACROBAT PDFWRITER" $ UPPER(tcPrinter)
lcOutputFile = "PRINTER"
ELSE
lcOutputfile = SUBSTRC(tcOutputDestination, AT_C(':',tcoutputdestination)+1)
ENDIF

REPORT FORM (tcLayoutName) NOCONSOLE TO (lcOutputFile)

As I said, under Acrobat 3, this works fine. The output is going to the printer, which is the Acrobat PDFWriter, and the report appears in the file "c:\temp\12345678.pdf". However, under Acrobat 4, this code sends the report output to "PRINTER.TXT.PDF", as well as creating a zero-byte file named "PRINTER.TXT". As I stated in the comments, the code works fine with Acrobat 4 on Win95/98.

Thinking that the fix we did for NT was the problem, I commented out the line that sets lcOutputFile to "PRINTER". That met with success, in a way. The output now went to "c:\temp\12345678.pdf.pdf", and created a zero-byte "12345678.pdf".

Worse, when I tested this code on a machine with Acrobat 3, I received an error saying the program could not create the output file...then it went ahead and created the file anyway, with the name "c:\temp\12345678.pdf.pdf" and a zero-byte "12345678.pdf"

My questions are:
-- How can I strip off the .pdf extension that Acrobat 4 insists on putting on my report output? Did something in SP3 change so the program can detect the type of file we are directing out output to, and automatically put the correct file extension?
-- Does anyone know why sending the output to the printer (Acrobat PDFWriter) works fine when using Acrobat 3.02, but not when using Acrobat 4? The Adobe people are less-than-knowledgabe about FoxPro (learned from earlier conversations), so I don't know how much help they would be in fixing what is probably a FoxPro problem.
-- If all else fails, does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can retrieve the version number of Adobe from within FoxPro? If there really is some fundamental and irreconcilable difference between Acrobat 3.02 and Acrobat 4, I may have to write code to handle each version differently.


TIA,

Bill