EnFocus is a small Belgian company developing solutions for PDF workflow management. PitStop Professional 6..5 is their first product to work with Acrobat 7. PitStop Professional is a preflight solution with a twist: it also allows you to change and adjust objects, elements, and settings of an existing PDF.

The most important feature of PitStop Pro from the point of view of PDF workflow undoubtedly is its preflighting capability. Acrobat 7 has a rather extensive preflight capacity built-in but this is by no means comparable to PitStop Professional’s capabilities.

PitStop Professional offers a very large number of pre-defined profiles to preflight against. These profiles often originate from people in the industry itself, so that preflight profiles exist for PDF/X --as in Acrobat 7 natively-- but also for newspaper printing with a specific dot gain, for example. The big difference between Acrobat and any EnFocus product, however, is that the latter’s preflighting results in a PDF being certified to comply with industry standards for printing PDF documents.

In Belgium and the Netherlands, Certified PDF has become more or less the standard. In order for a printer to accept responsibility for having a PDF printed in compliance with the expectations of the document supplier, the document must preflight as a Certified PDF.

The characteristics of the profiles that are at the core of Certified PDF are drafted by the Ghent PDF Workgroup, an international workgroup of printing and PDF professionals.

PitStop Pro’s preflighting capacities are also more elaborate when it comes to reporting. The report resulting from a preflight is far more extensive than Acrobat’s. PitStop’s preflighting capabilities can be further expanded by joining EnFocus’ CertifiedPDF.Net service. This paying service ensures that members can exchange profiles for PDF workflows, which results in the PDF document being Certified.

CertifiedPDF.Net does more for its members than just this, but we will dedicate a separate feature story to the service and its meaning for certified PDF.

PitStop Pro does more than just preflight. It is also an editing tool with which elements from a PDF can be changed and edited. A good example of why you would want to change a PDF document is when the document supplier decides that the printed document should be printed on Europan A4 and US Letter. If the document is laid out for A4, you have a problem with margins and perhaps wiith page numbers as well (they usually sit in a corner, don’t they?).