> If you are processing on the linux side and not via samba, and > your program will take a list of files on the command line instead of > groveling through the directory itself, you might simply start it with a > wild-card filename on the command line. The shell will sort the list as > it expands it so programs see the sorted list. > > The processing is done via Samba. Acrobat Distiller is not simply processing a list of files, it is consolidating a group of files onto a single file, discarding repeated graphic objects and creating a single subset of fonts from the various font subsets present on the original pages. >> There is a workaround to this: use the runfilex script that comes with >> Acrobat: it can contain a list of files to convert, in the order you >> want. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable for us since the process >> then takes about 40 minutes (irrespective of platform or filesystem), >> instead of 3 or 4 minutes. >> > > That's very strange. Maybe you should look for a different tool. Won't > ghostscript/psutils or OOo do this? > The tools you quote do not apply in this case. I am not talking about office style PDFs, I am talking about full professional PDFs for printing presses, with embedded color profiles such as ISO Newspaper, JPEG2000 compression, bicubic resampling, etc. Not even Ghostscript does that kind of thing. I wish it did, but it doesn't.