

Registry keys under the HKEY Current User allow you to apply this setting. To make things more complicated, the key is set per-computer, per-user, per-application, per-printer: The location for Adobe Acrobat 7, Adobe Acrobat 8, Adobe Reader 8, Adobe Acrobat 9, and Adobe Reader 9 are all different and use slightly different methods to apply this setting. But where do you set it as default and how do you set it for multiple users on a machine and multiple machines on a network? Fortunately, the “Print as Image” setting is a work-around for these problems. This is a rather buried location for a setting that can bring down a printer or printing system (PDFs and PS driver do not always play nicely together and sometimes poorly-formed PDFs can bring down an HP Laserjet printer with a service engine error: “49.00FF Service Error”). To get to this setting, you would go File -> 1. For certain printers, certain PDF documents, and certain print setups, using the “Print as Image” setting in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader is the only way to reliably get a print job to succeed.
