Product Reviews

The growth of PDF-based print workflows has earned Enfocus' Pitstop, an Acrobat preflighting plug-in, a place as a vital, if complicated, prepress tool. This new version not only adds powerful features, but goes some way to ending its long-held reputation for inscrutability.

Pitstop's intimidating list of editing, repairing and preflighting functions is still shoehorned into Acrobat through a mix of menus, garish purple toolbar buttons and floating panels. However, they're better organised and far easier to understand in this latest version.

Take the Global Change panel, where access to document-wide editing features - from scaling page content to adjusting font attributes - has been simplified to allow you to filter by keyword and view and apply changes by category. Similar usability touches have been visited on a new View and File control panel, which provides a more user-friendly overview of your chosen Acrobat display modes and colour settings. Green dots indicate settings that match your choice, while red dots show differences. To bring them into line, you just need to click the Fix button.

Pitstop's Action Lists allow you to string together common tasks, such as changing the colour space of images, that can be performed on a range of pages or a whole document. Handily, you can now group actions into folders in the Action Lists panel and share them with others across a network. Pitstop comes with a range of pre-built Action types, although you can build new ones easily with the help of the same category filters as the Global Change panel. Even more simply, you can now record an action as you go, although we found this was hindered by the fact that we could only record Pitstop Actions: native Acrobat functions

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were ignored.

Pitstop is most frequently called into action to preflight documents against one of a range of editable PDF profiles, now expanded to include PDF/X-2003 support and an all-in-one PDF/X check and fix. As well as the basic fixes automatically performed by the profile, you can now add your own Actions to the mix and embed these into the profile.

When you run an Action or profile, its results are logged in a self-generated PDF report or in the vastly improved Navigator panel, which lists errors and fixes made. The real boost is the way you can now step through problems: individual errors are visually highlighted on the page, with other areas greyed out.

Disappointingly, Pitstop Professional, unlike some other plug-ins, can't be used with Acrobat's Batch Sequence feature. However, version 7 boasts its own automation alternative, QuickRun, that turns out to be a more than adequate alternative. The QuickRun editing window is brought up via the toolbar and you can quickly build a complicated series of actions lists to run as a single task. You can even follow it by automatically running a PDF profile. The result is the removal of a lot of manual tweaking and checking.

Pitstop creates a new toolbar button for each defined QuickRun, so you can run any one of up to 20 different automation routines at the touch of a button. The drawback here is that it's difficult to tell QuickRuns apart, as they share identical toolbar icons.

There are other welcome additions, too. We like the new ability to convert fonts to outlines manually through Action Lists or the Global Change panel, and the well thought-out toolbar-based Cropping tool, which lets you quickly define page box sizes.

Best of all is a feature that will be a godsend to anyone making last-minute changes to a PDF workflow: the ability to import and place external PDFs in a set position. Although the placement process appears awkward, it's as precise as you need it to be, allowing you import a PDF into a preselected box or specify exact placement co-ordinates. Even better, such nested PDFs remain fully editable afterwards.While Acrobat continues to make inroads into Pitstop's preflighting territory, Pitstop Professional remains a must-have plug-in for PDF workflows, and version 7 only cements that position.