Review: This powerful add-on toolbox for Adobe Acrobat is a must-have for PDF production professionalsAt $599, PitStop is one of those rare plug-in programs that costs more than the program it's built upon. But publishing professionals should be happy that these tools are available at this price—they turn Adobe Acrobat in a full-featured PDF publishing production workshop.
PitStop, from Enfocus Software, works with both Acrobat Standard and Professional, but it's really only logical to use it with the latter.
As an upgrade, PitStop Professional 6.5 doesn't offer too many fireworks—its major enhancements are its compatibility with Acrobat 7 (and PDF version 1.6) and Mac OS X 10.4 (a.k.a. Tiger).
One exception is the program's ability to edit text using embedded fonts, which had disappeared in version 6, but is back now that Enfocus has found a way to respect the restrictions that some font vendors place on the use of embedded fonts.
Users of version 6 shouldn't hesitate to upgrade (it's free), and the price isn't bad for users of version 5 ($149) or versions 4.5/4.6 ($249) either.
The Problem with PostScript
PostScript and its more civilized face, PDF, are victims of their own success. They were each designed as a means of generating a faithful simulacrum of a page, independent of the application that created it.
Such a device- and application-independent picture of a page is a very useful thing until you have to edit it. Although PostScript has been updated to make it easier to manage and alter the parts of a page image, it remains a page description language, not a page composition language. It barely sees text as text, for example, essentially viewing it as an array of characters in space, each with its own x-y coordinates. Text doesn't flow; it sits stagnant.
Click here to read Jim Felici's review of Acrobat 7.
If a PostScript or PDF image of a page were indeed its final incarnation ready for viewing or printing, there would be no problem. But "final" versions of files are rarely final, and PDF itself has become a handy medium for commenting and approval cycles.
The ability to edit PDF files has gone beyond being a troubleshooting process and has become a daily necessity, and PitStop offers tools for the trade.
Using PitStop you can edit text, vector art and Bezier paths, and bitmapped images. You can create image masks and adjust object colors, rotations, and angles and adjust or convert color spaces. You can edit page boxes (to define page sizes) and off-page features such as color bars, crop marks, and bleeds. You can copy attributes from one object and assign them to another, and its eyedropper tool can be used to reveal a cornucopia of page and object information, from color space to overprint settings. Its preflighting and automatic correction tools are top-notch. Although this is a professional print-production tool, there is a lot in here that will appeal to graphic artists and creative professionals who have to massage PDF files.
Automation Innovation
PitStop's interactive editing tools are good, but the program excels at automating tedious manual interventions. If you run a printing plant, prepress house, or service bureau you don't have time to tweak troubled files by hand, and many PDF problems are painfully predictable.
PitStop's primary mechanism for this is Action Lists. If you have scriptophobia, fear not—building Action Lists is much easier than writing scripts, and the dialog-box-based interface makes it easy to build quite complex sets of processes that can then be executed at the push of a button. You can even build an Action List from actions you've just carried out manually by copying actions step-by-step from the program's Undo list. Very clever.
These actions fall into four categories:
• Select selects the page elements that need to be changed. The selection process can be modified with the familiar logical operators "and," "not," and "or."
• Change alters the selected page elements, changing, for example, color, typeface, size, and rotation. It can also add new page elements, such as page numbers or watermarks.
• Check inspects the document for the presence or absence of objects, conditions or page features. It can scan fonts, colors, OPI elements, or many other object- property or content-related features.
• Inform provides feedback on aspects of the file that you want revealed in the program's preflight report.
Added altogether, these four action types create a sprawling and comprehensive search-and-replace engine for just about any aspect of a PDF document.
Read the full story on PDFzone.com: PitStop Pro Heads Off Costly Last-Minute Glitches
