Product Reviews

When Adobe patched Acrobat 5 to allow it to run under Mac OS X, it left many third-party plug-ins high and dry because they were only designed to run in Classic mode. One of these was PitStop Professional, a suite of production-intensive tools for advanced PDF editing and prepress processing. Now Enfocus has upgraded the package to run under both Classic and OS X, with special support for Acrobat 6.

Correctional facility

While Acrobat 6 incorporates its own impressive preflighting function for analysing PDF errors and potential output problems, PitStop's alternative is more powerful because it offers auto-correction. More than half the issues identified by PitStop's preflighter can be fixed automatically by the plug-in without any further user intervention.

Most impressive this time round is the Action Lists feature, which is similar to Actions in Photoshop and is a custom automated script of program commands. However, you're not restricted to recording live commands to create an Action List: you can pick and choose available commands and options from a dialog, and even build them step by step from your current Undo history.

Usefully, the preflighter fully supports unique attributes in the PDF 1.5 format as generated by Acrobat 6, including JPEG 2000 compression, 16-bit images and document layers.

We also found PitStop's preflighter easier to configure: the dialog layout is big and the text prompts make everything clear.

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Our only disappointment was that the reports, although cleverly hyperlinked to take you to each problem area in the document, were created in plain black text. A bit of colour, as in Markzware's FlightCheck, wouldn't have gone amiss to help distinguish the three-tier feedback of Information, Warning and Error messages.

Pitstop is undoubtedly the best PDF editing plug-in you can buy. You can re-edit vector graphics and re-colour bitmap images directly on the page within Acrobat, using straightforward tools. Objects can be rotated, resized, sheared and be given new vector paths. You can copy and paste attributes between objects with an InDesign-like Eyedropper tool.

Significantly in this new release, colour management is taken very seriously, letting you remove, re-assign and embed fresh ICC profiles into selected objects and globally to all images as required. You can turn spot colours to process, and add entirely new colours to a document, again including spot colours, thanks to a built-in Pantone library.

Even for pedestrian text correction, PitStop goes way beyond Acrobat alone. Selecting a line or paragraph of text for editing is easy enough, but you can also click anywhere to add new text on a page.

Command structure

While Adobe has included PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 specifications into Acrobat 6, this latest edition of PitStop supports the full variety of PDF/X-3 options, with and without embedded profiles. PDF/X Plus is also supported, along with other emerging standards.

On that note, the PitStop Professional continues to offer Certified PDF functionality, in which PDFs automatically track their editing history, letting you trace back through the sequence of edits to find out who changed what, even letting you roll back to a previous version of the document.

Obviously the biggest obstacle to buying PitStop Professional 6 is the price, the plug-in suite being more expensive than Acrobat 6 itself. However, if advanced PDF production is your business, you can't really afford to be without it.