Product Reviews

This PDF creation and preflighting tool provides the first link in the chain of products supporting Enfocus' Certified PDF workflow (see Reviews, 14 June 2002, p33). It doesn't write PDFs itself, but bolts management features on to Acrobat Distiller. As with other Enfocus products, it's not yet available for Mac OS X, and the use of desktop printers precludes running it under Classic, so it's only suitable for systems booted in OS 8 or OS 9. A 30-day trial version is available for evaluation.

When plugged into Acrobat, InstantPDF creates a Certified PDF menu and displays a Queues icon in the File toolbar. The basic principle is that you create an InstantPDF queue for each output method you use: perhaps one for press, one for an in-house proofing device, and another for low-resolution soft proofs. Queues act as virtual printers accessible in the normal way from your content-creation applications (QuarkXPress, Photoshop, FreeHand or whatever).

Each queue is assigned a profile that determines PDF settings - font embedding, image compression, colour management and so on - as well as governing what's classed as an error during preflighting. Unfortunately, you can't create or edit these profiles within InstantPDF; to do this you need PitStop Professional. Otherwise, you can only choose among the ready-made profiles supplied with the package or available for download.

When you click Print in your source application, the document is output and you're taken into Acrobat, where the resulting PDF is preflighted. This can take anything from a few seconds to a few minutes. If the preflight is OK, the document is saved to a nominated folder, and can also be emailed or sent via FTP to someone else.

Inflexible friend
This automatic transmission is a nice idea, but rather than linking to your email software, InstantPDF uses an SMTP server name and port number that you enter as part of the queue setup. There's no provision for authentication

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or dial-up connections. Emailing begins without any warning or indication of file size, and the attached file is accompanied by a default message. This may all be OK for some users, but others will hate the inflexibility.

If errors are detected in preflighting, they're logged in a report with hyperlinks to the offending objects in the PDF. Some errors, such as spot colours in CMYK documents, can be fixed automatically; others, such as insufficient image resolution, can't, so you have to go back to the native application and make changes before re-outputting. While errors exist, you're not allowed to save the document, unless you use Save As... to create a copy, breaking out of the Certified PDF workflow.

The point of Certified PDF is to reassure users at each stage in the workflow that the correct output settings have been applied to a document and there are no outstanding preflight problems. In support of this, all changes are saved incrementally rather than overwriting previous versions, and an Edit Log not only shows what changes were made, when and by whom, but also lets you compare versions, or roll back to an earlier state and save it separately. This is clever stuff, and is useful both in ensuring successful output and in finding out where things went wrong if mistakes are made.
A few glitches were noted. The hyperlinks in preflight reports sometimes failed to work, leaving us guessing which items were at fault. We provoked a crash by trying to edit the definition of a queue after generating a document but before completing its preflight. Irritatingly, a series of error messages at the end of the queue setup process failed to make clear what information we had omitted or where it should be entered. The manual is comprehensive, suggesting how the various features can be of practical assistance and providing useful appendices on fonts and colour management.

Check mate
InstantPDF is reasonably priced, but its feature set is awkwardly truncated. As a preflighter alone, it's cheaper than Extensis PreFlight Pro but far more limited, handling only PDFs and lacking hot folder automation. It really only makes sense when used, as intended, within a Certified PDF workflow and in conjunction with at least one copy of PitStop Professional. Enfocus' laudable aim of implementing preflighting and workflow management in everyday desktop tools, rather than high-investment strategic solutions, might be better served by rolling the features of InstantPDF and PitStop Professional into a single, affordable package.