What's the best preflighting tool for checking PDFs, Markzware’s Flightcheck, Enfocus PitStop Professional or something else? – Philip

From our point of view, we very much like the Enfocus Pitstop. We use the Server edition. We also find the tech support is good too. – Seb Jenkins

We work with 3 preflight solutions. When mixed files come in (native and PDF), we use Flightcheck to preflight, so we have the same report for every file type. We use a centralized PDF-Creation process with the attached automatic version of pdfinspector - the process|prepress solution. pdfinspector is the fastest engine and is great if you need to check for very specific issues in a PDF document. And on the desktops we use Pitstop, since is has a nice user interface and is the only tool to alter contents of PDF documents, beside using QABOT to downsample PDFs and Heidelberg’s Supercolor to perform color transformations. Plus, with Autopilot from callas we also automated QUABOT and Supercolor. -- Peter Kleinheider

You cannot trust MarkzWare Flightcheck to check both native and PDF files. A client stated their PDFs preflight clean with MarkzWare Flightcheck -- only for me to commence interesting conversations starting with "What version are you using - ah! You need to upgrade to version xxx." And "yes I can see it passed your flightcheck but…" I have also found Flightcheck to be very, very slow in its last incarnation - Version 5.10 for OSX Panther.

Plus, Markzware Flightcheck checks for errors and informs you. Enfocus Pitstop checks for errors and fixes many common problems with PDFs automatically. It also has powerful 'Actions List' technology - a type of simple macro database that enables you to perform virtually any task on a PDF and automate.

Enfocus Pitstop for Acrobat and the stand-alone Server version are my personal favorites. On a half-decent workstation, Pitstop Server can process on average (in my tests) up to 500 pages in a minute (in one PDF document) and up to 100 single PDFs which also includes minor fixes to the PDFs (re-writing them back out). Therefore, for speed and simple automation, Pitstop Server wins hands-down. – Jon Bessant

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