Acrobat users already get a suite of callas preflight tools—which inspect for and, to a certain degree, fix problems in PDFs destined for the printing press—free in the box, as Adobe licenses some of its tools from the Berlin-based software company.

Now callas has announced three editions of its new pdfToolbox 3 suite for those who want additional automation and deeper preflight functionality in their prepress workflows: pdfToolbox 3, an Acrobat plug-in; pdfToolbox Server 3, a server application; and pdfToolbox CLI, a command-line interface for advanced automation at the hands of systems integrators and software developers.

Some of the deeper PDF prepress features found in pdfToolbox that aren't in Acrobat revolve around color management and PDF correction, says Peter Kleinheider, manager of print publishing technologies at callas.

Callas designed some of the tools specifically to help printers fix problems in the increasing number of files they're getting that clients generated in Microsoft applications, including Office and Publisher.

When doing spot-color conversion of Office files, for example, Acrobat does the best it can with colors and grays—but colors from those apps can be muted, and grayscale images turn into four-color separations.

"With our tools, it's a one-click conversion especially for Office documents where we keep the vivid colors, where an Office red turns out to be 100-100 [100% magenta and 100% yellow] red, and Office cyan is 100% cyan," Kleinheider says. "Anything that is gray—text or image—gets converted to the black plate only, and all the black vector elements will be set to overprint automatically."

(For the prepress uninitiated, these are some of the technical reasons that your mileage varies between your cheap desktop printer—where your project looks good—and the room-sized printing press that just chucked out a thousand not-as-good looking copies.)

Other features callas has built into pdfToolbox include straightforward preflight and preparation of PDFs for less technically inclined users—i.e., you tell pdfToolbox in what application the file originated (Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, etc.) and it automatically optimizes the file for print. Furthermore, it adds support for Cyrillic and Asian characters for font embedding, so preflight can get granular down to the glyph level.

It was a big day several years ago when callas got the call from Adobe saying that it had selected callas' suite of preflight tools from a field of several competitors for the then-upcoming Acrobat 6. Looking back, company founder Olaf Druemmer says it was a "big and pleasant surprise."

"The more than five years the callas team worked with Adobe on Preflight in Acrobat versions 6, 7, and 8 have been very fruitful for both sides, as well as for Acrobat users," Druemmer says, adding that the arrangement his company has with Adobe has kept it on top of emerging features in Acrobat and PDF. "[It's] allowed callas to keep our PDF analysis technology ahead of everyone else's."