Automation tools and Enfocus PDF library are part of the major upgrade to prepress editing/preflight Acrobat plug-in.SAVANNAH, Ga.—Enfocus offered journalists, customers and printing industry representatives a sneak peek at PitStop Professional 7 Friday during a company-sponsored think-tank gathering.
Enfocus officials said the product will be formally announced next month at IPEX, and the company hopes to ship the English-language version around May 1, with other localized versions to follow in the summer.
The updated Acrobat plug-in (priced at $599 for a new DVD, $199 for an upgrade from Version 6 and $299 for an upgrade from older versions) enables printers to perform checks on PDFs, fix problems and make light edits on the files en route to press. Officials said anyone who has purchased PitStop Pro 6 since Feb. 14 will get the Version 7 upgrade free.
One of users' top feature requests that is built into Version 7 is the ability to edit within form objects, said Enfocus North American Marketing Director Erik Cullins. "Form objects" in this case is a technical term for a partial page in a document and isn't to be confused with other kinds of forms, such as those the Internal Revenue Service produces for taxpayers.
Another big change in Version 7 is the incorporation of Enfocus' own PDF libraries. Cullins said PitStop Pro was the last product in the Enfocus line to get this upgrade partly because the company wanted to take its time integrating such a large new piece of technology into its bread-and-butter software. Many PDF software vendors license Adobe or Global Graphics libraries because building their own can be an expensive, time-consuming project requiring bandwidth for maintenance and upgrading that the vendors might not have. Enfocus, Cullins said, has built its own set of libraries to improve its control of PDF features and release dates of software.
Other major new features in PitStop include easier automation of Action Lists, oft-repeated series of tasks. While creating Action Lists was possible in previous versions, Cullins said that users—creative pros, who don't always have an intuitive understanding of programming metaphors—wanted a "recording" interface to create their custom actions, such as Photoshop Actions or Microsoft Word macros.
"It's one of [PitStop's] coolest features that very few people use; it's underutilized," Cullins said. "It's underused probably because we don't market it enough and because it's pretty difficult: a stack-based operation almost like a programming language . . . [but] you can record an Action List now, which makes it easier. It's still a stack-based operation, but it doesn't feel like it—makes it easier to build an Action but not really know what's going on under the hood."
Enfocus has built more efficient error-reporting tools into PitStop Pro 7, too. Accessing PitStop's preflight error reports for a production PDF has always involved saving the report as a separate PDF document, opening it and clicking links to find the errors in the production PDF. Now, in addition to that formal documentation process, PitStop Pro 7 features a pop-up window within Acrobat called the Enfocus Navigator, which offers instant access to errors and fixes, saving a number of steps.
Furthermore, PitStop's reports will offer links to help files and background information about the problems it finds in production PDFs, such as errant fonts, graphic resolution issues and incorrect color spaces. The help file links first appeared in Instant PDF, Enfocus software enabling graphic designers to fix problems in production PDFs before sending them to their printers who use PitStop.
When the PitStop upgrade was unveiled to the group, David Blatner, editor of InDesign Magazine, noted how PitStop's mass of buttons and windows added to Acrobat's can—if you're using certain Acrobat and PitStop features at the same time—greatly reduce a production person's usable workspace on a monitor. That kicked off a lively discussion about the developer's balancing act. PitStop's 70,000 users are divided on the screen-space issue. One group accuses Enfocus of hiding features rather than making them accessible, while another group bemoans the button bloat.
"It's a challenge; there's just some things you can't do because you're a plug-in vendor [as opposed to developing stand-alone apps]," Cullins said. "There's the debate of 'It's taking up too much real estate' versus 'One click—I don't want to have to go through a menu and pick my option.' "
Blatner made the case for redundancy: Make more PitStop features accessible via buttons, menu commands and keyboard shortcuts and let the users decide.
"Although Adobe has added some great creative pro features in Acrobat 6 and 7, it's still very clear that Acrobat is written for the
enterprise, not the creative pro market—it certainly doesn't fit
the look, feel, and power of the Creative Suite!" Blatner said in an e-mail to PDFzone. "Obviously, Enfocus PitStop Professional 6 has become part of the required toolbox for this industry. . . . [It] doesn't help the look and feel problem, but at least it gives us the power."
