With PDF now established as the document format for prepress, the question remains how best to create and check PDFs. The key tool, Acrobat, has its limitations, as Adobe itself acknowledged by shipping InProduction, a preflighting and separation add-on. InProduction was largely ignored, though, and was quietly dropped last year.
Meanwhile, Enfocus' PitStop, launched in 1997 as a basic correction tool, has grown into a comprehensive preflighting and editing package, picking up the 'professional' tag along the way. This latest release brings it up to date with Acrobat 5 and PDF 1.4.
PitStop sits in the middle of a range of products supporting Enfocus' PDF workflow vision. Central to this is Certified PDF, not a standard in itself, but a way of applying 'profiles' to document creation and processing. Audit information is stored within the file, so users throughout the workflow can not only see whether resolution, colour, fonts and so on are as they should be, but they can also check what's been adjusted, when and by who. Anyone in a workflow spanning designers, advertisers, bureaux and printers will know that, although the primary aim is to ensure nothing goes wrong, it's also important to know who to shout at when it does. By addressing both issues, Certified PDF has earned much support in the prepress industry.
PitStop Professional 5.01 installs as an Acrobat plug-in, adding toolbars, commands and palettes. Integration isn't perfect: some tools sit side-by-side with ones that they should replace, and there's a separate Undo chain for PitStop commands. Nonetheless, it's much neater than using a separate application.
Small change
The program's editing facilities are a considerable improvement on Acrobat's. Rather than altering single lines of text, you can edit paragraphs and tweak spacing. When a font has been embedded as a subset, you can add new characters by re-embedding the font. It's still not practical to reflow entire stories, but most last-minute corrections are possible.
Objects can be moved, scaled, rotated
ADVERTISEMENT
and replaced; you can edit any vector object as Bezier paths, and make or release compounds and masks. The tools don't precisely match those in drawing or DTP packages, and grouping is vague, but it doesn't take long to get the hang of it. The Inspector palette lets you see, edit and copy attributes such as position, colour and transparency. You can also apply global changes - for example, replacing all instances of a font, or imposing a minimum line weight - and create Action Lists for automation. This would help repurpose PDFs on a regular basis by downsampling images, switching colour spaces and so on.
To preflight a document, you select a profile from the PDF Profile control panel and click Create Report. A separate document is generated with error warnings hyperlinked to your PDF, so you can see where problems lie. A navigation palette lets you step through errors on the page. One hundred and forty issues are checked, and many can be fixed automatically if the profile dictates this. More than a dozen profiles are supplied, representing the PDF/X-1a standards and various generic press setups, with more available for download. However, as with any preflighting solution, you'll need a bit of time and savvy to tailor the profiles to your own workflow.
PitStop works well, except for sporadic delays. When you access any preflight function, a progress bar at the foot of the document window halts the entire computer. It disappears almost immediately, but can be confusing. Most preflight reports are completed in a few seconds, but we waited for as long as 10 minutes for others, which could make the whole exercise impractical in a time-critical environment. This often seemed to be due to simple recurring errors, such as incorrect colour spaces in PDFs from QuarkXPress; troubleshooting these once and for all, and tweaking profiles, helped.
Going native
Our other gripe is the lack of a Mac OS X-native version. The manual could at least have offered guidance for running under OS X; we launched PitStop successfully by altering Acrobat 5's Info to force it to open in Classic.
At around £375, this isn't a package you're likely to install on every workstation. It's better suited to a bottleneck position, such as the last production desk before repro, or the first desk at a small repro house. Note that PitStop only checks existing PDFs; to create PDFs to a profile you also need Instant PDF 2.0. Enfocus products are available for 30-day trial, and anyone working with PDFs would do well to check them out.
NEEDS: Mac OS 8.6 or higher, Acrobat 4.05 (limited functionality) or 5.x with at least 64Mb RAM allocated
