Manage PDF Presets (job options) in Adobe InDesign Server and Typefi Server for Workgroup

Successful implementation of Adobe PDF Presets within Adobe InDesign Server on Microsoft Windows depends on these four steps:

• Placing the files in their correct location, 
• Restarting InDesignServerService, 
• Refreshing the Typefi Server's InDesign settings panel, 
• Restarting Typefi Workgroup Server.

Prerequisites

This article covers a specific use case where the following items are true:

1. Typefi Server for Workgroup is present with the typefi-plugin-id plugins installed & licensed.
2. Adobe InDesign Server, version 2017 or above, is installed and configured to run as a Windows Service (or a macOS launch daemon).  
   Note: earlier versions of Adobe InDesign Server used different paths for storing these files.
3. Fully tested *.joboptions file that have been approved for production deployment. 

Procedure

1. Save the required files to the Adobe PDF settings folder.  On Windows this is the Resources\Adobe PDF\settings\mul part of the InDesign Server installation directory. For example, the locations may be

   Windows: %systemdrive%\Adobe\Adobe InDesign Server XXXX\Resources\Adobe PDF\settings\mul

2. Restart the Adobe InDesign Server service.
   
   
   
3. Log into the Typefi Server web UI (http://localhost:8080 default) as administrator, and click on Admin, then External Applications, InDesign.  Click the refresh button to update the settings list and immediately verify that the new preset is available.
   
   
   
4. Once confirmed that Typefi Server sees the latest PDF Preset, use reboot the system or restart the Typefi Server Workgroup service. This step is required for the preset to be usable. 
   

Suggestions for automation

We like to eliminate grunt work and managing PDF Presets presents a challenge that can be solved with a little bit of automation.  Our infrastructure team goes a step further to administer PDF Presets using a combination of:

• GIT repositories and scheduled checkouts, 
• symlinks to the mul folder which stores the files, 
• automation script that restart the required services. 

Storage and distribution of presets.

All of our presets undergo a quality assurance and testing process. Once approved, they are committed into our repository which is made available to all InDesign Servers in our environment.  This enables our team to version control our presets and maintain parity across all InDesign Servers. It also provides an additional layer of assurance as we are able to offer development and production branches to our systems.   Checkout is done on schedule, or through a push command.

Adobe InDesign Server "mul" folder.

We replace the original mul folder with a symlink as part of our installation routine.  This enables our systems to maintain version control independent of the installation and gives us flexibility for upgrades. 

function set-pdfpresets {
 $confirmation = Read-Host "Set-up the PDF Presets using our GIT Distribution (y/n)?"
 if ($confirmation -match "[yY]") {
 $adobedirs = Get-ChildItem "c:\Program Files\Adobe" -Directory
 Foreach ($dir in $adobedirs)
 {
 Write-Host "-t-> DEBUG: Adding PDF Presets to:" $adobedirs
 CMD /c RD /S /Q "c:\Program Files\Adobe\$dir\Resources\Adobe PDF\settings\mul"
 CMD /c mklink /D "c:\Program Files\Adobe\$dir\Resources\Adobe PDF\settings\mul" c:\ops\pdf_presets
 }
}

Restart InDesign and Typefi Server

function check-services($srvName) {
 $servicePrior = Get-Service $srvName
 $srvName + " is now " + $servicePrior.status
}

$service = "InDesignServerService x64"
 check-services "$service"
 $confirmation = Read-Host "Attempt to Restart $service"
 if ($confirmation -match "[yY]") {
 Restart-Service -Name "$service"
 }
 check-services "$service"
 }

 $service = "TypefiTomcat"
 check-services "$service"
 $confirmation = Read-Host "Attempt to Restart $service"
 if ($confirmation -match "[yY]") {
 Restart-Service -Name "$service"
 }
 check-services "$service"
 }