Acrobat plugin from callas replaces complex comands with simple buttons designed to eliminate the "need to be a PDF geek."Previewed at DRUPA, new suite of prepress Acrobat plugins remixes complicated functions into easy-to-digest button-based interface
It's a tough job for German prepress developer callas to sell pdfToolbox, but not because it's a hard sell. Instead, it's so good that Adobe's licensed a subset of its preflighting tools from callas for integration straight into Acrobat itself since version 6 in early 2003.
When a new Acrobat comes out—as Acrobat 9 recently did—it's a hard act to follow.
Peter Kleinheider, callas manager of print publishing technologies, says that the plugin adds both features like imposition not already included in Acrobat. It also adds ease of use to several key processes people making PDFs destined for print repeatedly need to do.
"Our tool is more than just the current way of doing preflighting and correcting. It's about getting things done—right away," Kleinheider says. "You can do that without the need to be a PDF geek."
A new, interface takes some fairly heavy back-end processes and makes them one-click operations, in slick little button-based menu windows that some might think are inspired by the iPhone, quite a departure for callas.
"With the new revamped UI, it is very easy to adopt PDFs," Kleinheider says. "If you want to scale a PDF, as an example, you just navigate to the pages section and scale to a defined size or to a given percentage. Our tool takes care that all additional adoptions, like the recalculation of the various page boxes, are done automatically. Another example is the conversion of a PDF to grayscale...this is a challenge with the [existing] tools out there."
Other new features in pdfToolbox 4:
Support for new ISO standards as well as those "around the bend" including PDF/A, PDF/E, the recently released PDF/X-4; PDF/X-4p and PDF/X-5 also present and accounted for.
New imposition features for publications ranging from simple booklets to complex impositions for digital printing. Straightforward creation of language or regional variations of publications, with extensive support for localization workflows.
Kleinheider says callas, has been working over the last several years to merge its products into one tool based on a single core technology. pdfToolbox 4 is the first rev where they're all together, and as such, callas can offer the software as an Acrobat plug-in now, and in the coming weeks more quickly turn around new versions of a server version as well as a Linux command-line interface (CLI) flavor.
"The CLI version [will be] primarily used in Web-based applications, due its easy implementation," Kleinheider says. "Be it an in-house intranet solution like some larger printer utilize it for centralized PDF checking and preparation or a PDF print portal like Hubcast."
The server version, Kleinheider says, will likely be utilized by prepress houses building automated workflows with Gradual Software's SWITCH products.
