Add a Pit Crew to Your PDF Editing and Preflighting with PitStop Professional 08

Enfocus has developed a commanding toolset that takes care of all the would be “headaches” in PDF exchange. Their Certified PDF Technology not only guarantees that a PDF document was preflighted with the relevant PDF profile, it also provides a comprehensive preflight report and keeps track of all the changes made to a PDF file throughout the entire workflow.

PDF editing tools, such as Enfocus PitStop Professional, are very convenient for making intermediate or last-minute corrections in PDF documents. This saves you both time and money because you do not have to go back to the original application program to recreate the PDF. PitStop Professional gives you that capability in an easy-to-use and dependable plug-in.

PitStop Professional has perfected the interactive error checking process, boasting all the necessary interactive error checking and correction tools. Since it is an Adobe® Acrobat® plug-in, you can open any PDF file, preflight it with one of the standards-based PDF Profiles that are included in the package, or customise your PDF Profile and modify the file when needed. And since PitStop lets you spot potential problems before the job goes to output, you save money. And in today’s economy, who doesn’t want to do that?

Through Global Change and Action Lists, PitStop Professional enables you to automate recurring and repetitive tasks that otherwise would take hours. It also means that any last minute incoming ads that have errors won’t keep you from making your deadline. PitStop Professional’s menus are integrated seamlessly into the Adobe Acrobat menus amd it also has dedicated menus of it’s own in the Adobe Acrobat menu bar: Certified PDF and Plug-Ins > Enfocus PitStop Professional. The PitStop Professional toolbars are intuitively located next to or below the Adobe Acrobat toolbars.

To preflight PDF documents with PitStop, you use what are called PDF Profiles. A PDF Profile is a collection of criteria or guidelines which a PDF document should meet to be output worthy. For each criterion, you can specify if it should be checked or not and how it should be listed in the preflight report, (i.e. “Warning” or “Error”) if a deviating property is detected in the PDF document. 

Even better, criteria allow you to specify how detected problems, if any, should be fixed. You can preflight any document and get a customized preflight report. This means that a company can identify itself in the preflight report and that way the customer knows who preflighted a particular document. You can view a detailed report of all the errors, warnings, fixes and failures by simply selecting a report layout and clicking Show report.

PitStop Professional makes preflighting easy by providing a broad selection of pre-configured PDF Profiles that check and correct all common prepress errors. PDF Profiles are based on PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3 and PDF/X-4 and the very latest Ghent PDF Workgroup standards are incorporated.

But first, before you perform a preflight check in your PDF document, you may need to perform edits. The value of PitStop Professional continues as you can use Action Lists to perform a number of Global Changes. For example, you may have a number of Action Lists to correct or change colors in your PDF document. Instead of running these Action Lists separately and then performing the preflight check, you can include these Action Lists to your PDF Profile.

For starters, I should tell you that with PitStop, you can view a PDF document in either Preview mode or Wireframe mode from within Adobe Acrobat. In Preview mode, you basically see the pages, objects and text in the PDF document as they will print. Wireframe view mode is matchless if you want to look at a PDF document in order to view and select objects which are, say partly covered by other objects, or if you want to view and edit masks or make pages display more quickly if they contain many or large pixel images.

You can specify the maximum file size of your PDF documents with PitStop as well. If the file size is larger, the problem will be indicated in the Enfocus View and File Control Panel. PitStop Professional also allows you to manipulate the page content in the following ways:

• Move the page content

• Scale the page content

• Scale the page content to fit

• Scale the entire page

• Flip the page content

• Rotate the page content

You can automatically add text to any pages you choose to in your PDF documents. This can be fixed text, (for example a header or footer) or variable text, (i.e. a page number or the current time and date). PitStop also gives you the ability to make objects transparent or change their transparency settings. You can remove transparency from a selected object or from an entire page. Sometimes, your PDF document may contain objects which are placed on top of each other, so if you wish to edit one of the underlying objects, you may have to bring this object to the front first, to be able to do so. For situations like this, PitStop Professional enables you to change the order in which the objects are stacked.

If you want to transform an object more accurately than by dragging and using one of the transform tools (Move , Rotate , Shear or Scale) you simply use the Enfocus Inspector. The Enfocus Inspector allows you to transform any object in your PDF document by specifying exact values taking the guesswork out of the whole process. Transforming an object can include one or more of the following actions:

• Moving

• Scaling

• Stretching

• Flipping

• Rotating

The Enfocus Place PDF tool enables you to place external pages in PDF format (such as ads) in an existing PDF.  While performing the lay-out when an ad is still missing, you simply set a container (e.g. colored box) where the ad is supposed to go. Then when the ad finally arrives, in Acrobat Professional go to Plug-ins > Enfocus PitStop Professional > Enfocus Place PDF (or use the keyboard shortcut OPTION+CMD+L). This opens the Enfocus Place PDF Window. Click on the 'Browse' button to locate the ad to be placed and this will open the OS browse dialog and you can search for the document. If you have a multi-page document selected, you have to decide which page to place. With single page documents you don't need to set this criterion. Using PitStop, you can also place pages of PDF documents inside another PDF document. You might wish to do this, for example, to do manual impositioning or to place multiple pages of one or more PDF documents “n-up” on one page of another PDF document. Placed PDF documents become “forms” and you can manipulate them deftly using the Edit Form tool.

Additionally, you can create new single text lines or edit existing ones. This is exceptionally useful to make minor adjustments, such as correcting typos. If you need to make indepth changes to text which spans across multiple lines, you can use the Edit Paragraph tool. You can use this tool to select a “logical text entity” which is generally a chunk of text between two punctuation marks or spaces, or with different font properties. You can also use it to add a new paragraph of text to your PDF document.

Another great feature is that you can actually specify the number of undos you want to have the capability of. A higher number of undos does require more memory, but the option is valuable, especially when tweeking an ad or making substantial changes to a PDF.

You can change the fill or stroke color of text or line-art objects in your PDF documents as well. You can select a color from the same color space, from a different one or from the User Swatches. Once you have selected a color, you can also specify the object’s fill or stroke attributes. You can even add bleed and do color-managed color conversions on an object-to-object basis and these features are hard to find even in a full-blown desktop publishing application. For maximum color fidelity, you get to pick the color engine of your choice from a range of industry standard CMS solutions.

PitStop provides a “snapshot”, or visual representation of the state of a PDF document at the time it was saved after an editing session. You just save a snapshot to revert to a previous version of your PDF document. However, you don’t have to save this snapshot at the end of each session and instead could simply select any session from a list and save its snapshot at any stage in your workflow.

If you have regular sequences of tasks which you have to do a number of times—either within a single PDF document or in multiple PDF documents—you can simplify those repetitious tasks by grouping a series of them into an Action List. Action Lists make powerful automation possible such as adding or removing logos, page headers or converting colors. Then, once you have created an

Action List, you can reuse it over and over again. Simply put, Action Lists allow you to build powerful document-modifying scripts directly into your preflighting process.

When you run an Action List or PDF Profile in your PDF document, a number of properties of your PDF document will be checked and, if necessary, fixed. Since you’ll want to know exactly what wasfixed or changed, enter the Enfocus Navigator. The Navigator makes this a snap and depending on your Enfocus Preferences (if you wish) the Navigator can appear right after you have run an Action List or PDF Profile.

Enfocus engineers have totally revamped the Enfocus Navigator which enables interactive fixing and speeds up file repair by clearly indicating where the errors are, contributing to the productive and intuitive preflight and fixing experience. With a clear overview of all errors and warnings, and a variety of highlighting possibilities, it is straightforward to find and fix any error interactively. Each PitStop panel has a help section explaining its functionality, making it easier for users to correctly utilize every function. It was a breeze to get information on the fly and I felt like a pro in no time. In addition, the preflight report help section has been integrated giving concise, yet complete, information on the messages found on the preflight report. This allows you to act instantly and accurately on errors found in your report.

Certified PDF is a PDF workflow concept developed by Enfocus Software based on their customer requests and feedback from experts and power users. The Certified PDF concept has been designed to address three fundamental issues faced by the majority of users that find themselves implementing a PDF workflow:

• How to guarantee that a PDF document was successfully preflighted with a specific PDF Profile.

• How to maintain consistency between the source document(s) and the PDF document when (minor) changes can be applied to the PDF document throughout the workflow.

• And how to minimize risk and responsibility when changing a customer’s PDF document before final output.

Certified PDF documents can include job information which can be any kind of particulars about the PDF document which you would like to share with the person who will receive it. This can include, for example, the name, company address and contact details for whom the PDF document is intended, and any additional remarks which the recipient of the PDF file has to know such as details about how the PDF should be printed and any changes made. The Certified PDF mechanism in PitStop Professional keeps a record of every editing session of a Certified PDF document and all of the changes made are actually logged chronologically and conveniently within your document.

Obviously, I could go on and on about the powerful features of PitStop, such as the ability to take colors used in a document without necessarily knowing the values (e.g. a custom yellow) and apply them on other documents. If you want to use a specific color in a different file, normally you’d have to check what the color is made of (RGB values, CMYK percentages) and then reconfigure that color in the other document. But PitStop Professional has an option which is called the Color Picker which allows you to select a color and save it in a Color Repository (or Color Library). Once the color is saved in the Color Repository you can use it to configure features like Action Lists or the Global Change Panel in most Enfocus products.

Using PitStop Professional for your PDF editing and preflighting will make you feel like you have a knowledgeable, reliable and fast-working pit crew at your disposal that doesn’t need vacations, coffee breaks or even a paycheck. You’ll start saving time, money and frustration with it’s first use and you’ll wonder how you’ve done without “the crew” for so long—especially in today’s economy.