Product Reviews

The popularity of PDF as a prepress file format continues to grow. But the human factor - the need for changes as documents go to press - remains frustratingly consistent. Enfocus Neo is a standalone PDF 1.6 viewer and editor that could make the weakness of PDF in such situations - its comparative lack of editability - a thing of the past.

Although Adobe's Acrobat, coupled with plug-ins, can already make extensive changes to PDFs, Neo makes PDF editing its core function rather than an afterthought. Available in versions with and without trapping, its palette-based interface should look immediately familiar to anyone who has already worked with with InDesign or QuarkXPress.

At first, this familiarity misleads as Neo's tool palette doesn't do quite what you might expect. What looks like the equivalent of InDesign's direct selection tool is in fact a spline editor that draws and edits Bezier curves. And what appears at first glance to be an Eyedropper colour sampling tool is a densitometer. When you use this to click on an area of the page, it shows sampled separation values and total ink percentage at the mouse location.

Editing with Neo also takes getting used to. Moving or rotating objects is a two-step procedure. You select an object with the Selection tool and move or rotate it with the Transform tool. If this sounds awkward, its undeniable logic helps you get used to it. In other ways Neo feels more flexible than DTP applications. For example, its unlimited zoom means you can drill down to the smallest page element and the Selector palette lets you constrain a selection according to an object's attributes, from its transparency to its fill colour. This approach makes it easy to select all text that matches a certain typeface or a specified size. You can then replace all occurrences of that font

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with another, although you'll need to use the Objects palette to replace the text.

Getting used to switching between palettes is a Neo rite of passage. The View Separations palette displays separations and can preview the document with particular separations on and off. But when it comes to adding and remapping separations - useful if you have an extra spot colour that you want to remap to CMYK - the controls to do so are contained in the separate Resources palette. Again, at least there is reason behind these usability decisions.

For a version 1 product, Neo feels remarkably feature complete. It comes with powerful object editing tools for adjusting transparency, blending modes and deals superbly with text. You can resize a text box by dragging its adjusting handles. The text inside - even entire paragraphs - moves fluidly as you do this. While Neo doesn't solve all issues - for example, links between text boxes aren't maintained from the orginating application - this is the easiest way we've seen to edit text directly in a PDF.

Neo also lets you place images in a document, automatically adding separations if necessary. Rather than double-clicking the image itself, you double-click the image thumbnail in the Fill Paint palette to open it in the image editing application of your choice. Third-party editing is seamless: for example when you re-save an image in Photoshop, it automatically updates the image in the PDF.

One of Neo's most powerful features is the way it works with the 'certified PDF' system developed by Enfocus itself. Certified PDFs can record and store preflighting information and log changes made to the file. In Neo's case, preflighting is as simple as saving with the program's Save and Preflight menu option, which tests the document against one of a choice of profiles and, optionally, incrementally saves the document. Incremental saving keeps track of changes made to the file. This editing history, right down to when the document was opened and closed and a complete record of its preflighting history, is viewable in the program's History palette. From here you can quickly return to a previously saved version at any stage.

Neo is unquestionably the most flexible, powerful PDF editing application we've seen. Its hefty price tag limits its appeal to the professional print market, where time saved on the presses could quickly recoup the initial cost.