On the eve of Adobe Acrobat 9's introduction, PDF print production vendor Enfocus announced enhansepends that could bridge the format divide created by competition between Adobe and Microsoft.

The announcement, made during the once-every-four-years international printing trade show DRUPA in Dusseldorf, Germany.

New versions of the company's Switch print- and file-management software can take files in XPS—Microsoft's much-hyped, PDF-like file format—and convert to PDF via Actino Software XPS Toolkit, signaling an early market acknowledgment of XPS's legitimacy in the print world.

"While XPS is not present to a high degree in publishing workflows today, it can be expected that more and more XPS documents will find their way to publishers and printers," says David van Driessche, Enfocus marketing director. "Having a strategy to deal with those documents will become very important. Publishers and printers now have a high-quality conversion path from XPS to PDF--a file format they know how to deal with."

Enfocus founder Peter Camps announced that the company's throwing open to developers, royalty-free, its Certified PDF specification. A method for creating PDFs that are up-to-snuff for print production, Certified PDF can also tracks changes made to PDFs in the print workflow stream.

"We're proud to be able to make this important announcement to open up the Certified PDF technology to other vendors," Camps says. "This will enable more vendors to support Certified PDF, leading to a wider choice of applications with embedded Certified PDF technology. This initiative is in line with our company mission to offer end-to-end automation solutions to the graphic arts and publishing sectors in collaboration with other vendors."

The company also announced a series of other upgrades:

Pitstop Pro 08: New features include sign-off on preflight errors; a redesigned PitStop Inspector; better page configuration handling; expanded contextual menus to help navigate through its many and complicated features; and updated OS compatibility. Also included is PDF/X-4 support and simpler PDF Profile adaptation for creating new preflight profiles from existing items.

PitStop Server 08: Enfocus says that the new version of its hot-folder network implementation of PitStop features a significant performance bump as well as a reworked interface to make using it easier. It can now run as a service on Windows and as a login item on Mac OS X. Key to its performance upgrade is a new parallel-processing scheme in which two PDFs can be handled at a time.

Switch 08: New versions of LightSwitch, FullSwitch and PowerSwitch enable more precise automation of print workflows and offer more options for prioritization of files as they work their way through to press. Based on user feedback, Enfocus built in finer control of scheduling of content processed via hot folders, FTP and email receive tools. Switch 08 also offers a "read-only" processing mode where the original files are left on the server and a copy is processed through the flow.