If the person you are helping is getting “visual oddities” in the images when directly creating PDF, there are likely problems in either the Word document, the images / artwork within the Word document, or both.
The only reason to go through the craziness of creating PostScript and then converting that to PDF would be if you have EPS graphics in your Word document, something that is exceptionally rare these days. Adding Acrobat provides a means of getting an Adobe Acrobat-optimized PDF file.
Why in the world would they create PDF from Word, especially under MacOS, by creating PostScript and then distilling? Even without Acrobat installed, you can easily create PDF from Word both directly from Word and from the print dialog.
