Review: This powerful add-on toolbox for Adobe Acrobat is a must-have for PDF production professionalsAt $599, PitStop is one of those rare plug-in programs that costs more than the program it's built upon. But publishing professionals should be happy that these tools are available at this price—they turn Adobe Acrobat in a full-featured PDF publishing production workshop.
PitStop, from Enfocus Software, works with both Acrobat Standard and Professional, but it's really only logical to use it with the latter.
As an upgrade, PitStop Professional 6.5 doesn't offer too many fireworks—its major enhancements are its compatibility with Acrobat 7 (and PDF version 1.6) and Mac OS X 10.4 (a.k.a. Tiger).
One exception is the program's ability to edit text using embedded fonts, which had disappeared in version 6, but is back now that Enfocus has found a way to respect the restrictions that some font vendors place on the use of embedded fonts.
Users of version 6 shouldn't hesitate to upgrade (it's free), and the price isn't bad for users of version 5 ($149) or versions 4.5/4.6 ($249) either.
The Problem with PostScript
PostScript and its more civilized face, PDF, are victims of their own success. They were each designed as a means of generating a faithful simulacrum of a page, independent of the application that created it.
Such a device- and application-independent picture of a page is a very useful thing until you have to edit it. Although PostScript has been updated to make it easier to manage and alter the parts of a page image, it remains a page description language, not a page composition language. It barely sees text as text, for example, essentially viewing it as an array of characters in space, each with its own x-y coordinates. Text doesn't flow; it sits stagnant.
Click here to read Jim Felici's review of Acrobat 7.
If a PostScript or PDF image of a page were indeed its final incarnation ready for viewing or printing, there would be no problem. But "final" versions of files are rarely final, and PDF itself has become a handy medium for commenting and approval cycles.
The ability to edit PDF files has gone beyond being a troubleshooting process and has become a daily necessity, and PitStop offers tools for the trade.
Using PitStop you can edit text, vector art and Bezier paths, and bitmapped images. You can create image masks and adjust object colors, rotations, and angles and adjust or convert color spaces. You can edit page boxes (to define page sizes) and off-page features such as color bars, crop marks, and bleeds. You can copy attributes from one object and assign them to another, and its eyedropper tool can be used to reveal a cornucopia of page and object information, from color space to overprint settings. Its preflighting and automatic correction tools are top-notch. Although this is a professional print-production tool, there is a lot in here that will appeal to graphic artists and creative professionals who have to massage PDF files.
Automation Innovation
PitStop's interactive editing tools are good, but the program excels at automating tedious manual interventions. If you run a printing plant, prepress house, or service bureau you don't have time to tweak troubled files by hand, and many PDF problems are painfully predictable.
PitStop's primary mechanism for this is Action Lists. If you have scriptophobia, fear not—building Action Lists is much easier than writing scripts, and the dialog-box-based interface makes it easy to build quite complex sets of processes that can then be executed at the push of a button. You can even build an Action List from actions you've just carried out manually by copying actions step-by-step from the program's Undo list. Very clever.
These actions fall into four categories:
• Select selects the page elements that need to be changed. The selection process can be modified with the familiar logical operators "and," "not," and "or."
• Change alters the selected page elements, changing, for example, color, typeface, size, and rotation. It can also add new page elements, such as page numbers or watermarks.
• Check inspects the document for the presence or absence of objects, conditions or page features. It can scan fonts, colors, OPI elements, or many other object- property or content-related features.
• Inform provides feedback on aspects of the file that you want revealed in the program's preflight report.
Added altogether, these four action types create a sprawling and comprehensive search-and-replace engine for just about any aspect of a PDF document.
Certifiably Well-Behaved PDFs
Of all its automations, PitStop's most significant is probably its ability to create what Enfocus calls Certified PDF files. These are PDFs that meet criteria defined in PDF Profiles that both document creator and document end-user agree upon.
The international standards for PDF format compliance are the various flavors of PDF/X, but these are based on old versions of the PDF spec (version 1.4 at the latest) and subsets of those specs at that.
Using the Certified PDF concept, those involved in a PDF workflow can define their own standards and enforce them by using Enfocus's preflighting and certification tools. Acrobat's own preflighting tools are excellent, but they can't (yet, at least) assure PDF compliance in the flexible yet airtight way that PitStop's can.
Next Page: Editing PDFs is tricky business.
Like PitStop's Action lists, its PDF Profiles can be extremely wide-ranging. They can be as prescriptive and restrictive as you want. You can choose to identify nonconforming features as merely noteworthy or as errors that need to be corrected (because, for example, a fatal problem during imagesetting may be inconsequential during desktop proofing).
A Certified PDF gets a digital signature (you'll need a registered digital ID) to verify its authenticity, and it can be secured against alteration. PitStop's preflighting tools don't just compare a PDF file against a PDF Profile, they can automatically change many aspects of the file to enforce conformity. This may not be an industry standard, but this or something like it deserves to be standard practice.
Pitfalls with PitStop
Editing PDF files at all is a dicey proposition. PDF is a delivery medium. Documents are created and managed in other applications, such as page layout programs. PDFs are useful for creating feedback loops, but it's very easy to create permanent disconnects between the PDF and its source file. PitStop offers some tools for coping with this.
The certified PDF file can contain a log of all the changes to the PDF file, thus allowing feedback to the source file to keep them in harmony (or simply to note corrections made in the PDF). The program can also keep a log of who made what changes and when and allow you to roll back changes to previous saved versions. You can also compare versions to locate inconsistencies.
Click here to read Jim Felici's review of ARTS PDF's Nitro PDF Desktop.
To accomplish this, you don't actually create multiple versions of a file, but rather "overlays" to it that contain only the changes from a particular editing session. These can be peeled away to get back to a previous version, although once you optimize a file this ability is lost. Enfocus calls these incremental stages "snapshots," and they can be saved out as new files if desired.
A problem with competent post-production tools such as PitStop is that they encourage people upstream in the workflow to say, "No problem—we'll fix that later." But PitStop is a production tool and should be used with great care as a creative or editorial one. It's good for emergency text edits, for example, but because of the nature of PostScript, you can't use it for extensive editorial adjustments.
An editing program such as PitStop can only do so much to get text to act as it does in a word processor. For example, it can analyze margins (looking for short lines and first-line indents) to divine where paragraphs begin and end. From the y coordinates of a series of characters in rows, it can figure out the leading of the text. By looking at those characters' x coordinates, it can calculate line length, or measure. This allows you to add text to a paragraph using PitStop tools, and the text will reflow and re-rag using the paragraph specs that the program has inferred from the positions of the characters on the page.
But a paragraph is not a PostScript entity, and changes that PitStop makes to one paragraph do not affect paragraphs around it. If a PitStop edit causes a paragraph to become longer, it will overlap the text below. If the edit makes a paragraph a line shorter, a gap will appear in the text. Because neither Acrobat nor PitStop has a text composition engine (all either can do is place one character next to another with their natural spacing) you cannot edit a paragraph and maintain its justified margins; when lines re-rag, they will do so flush-left. If you need to preserve justified margins, you should edit line by line and approximate justification by adjusting spaces manually, one word at a time using PitStop's repositioning tool. It's tedious, but possible.
PitStop knows to break a line at a "hard" hyphen you type in. On the other hand, hard hyphens are all it knows. PostScript regards "soft" hyphens that have been added to the text stream by the hyphenation routine in, say, a word processor, as any other hyphens, and if a PitStop edit pushes them into mid-sentence, there they will remain. Likewise, when a PitStop edit causes a line to re-rag, the words before and after the old line break will not be separated by a word space, because no such space (nor any line break character, for that matter) exists in the PostScript record of the text.
In short, text edits using PitStop need to be done with caution and proofread carefully.
Conclusion
PDF editing is a recipe for premature aging. It's at once a necessity and a nightmare, and the tools to make corrections can wreak havoc. The best PDF workflow is one where PitStop's tools aren't needed—where quality controls upstream assure smooth production flows later. To rely on last-minute editing is to invite disaster and insure inefficiency.
None of this is Enfocus's problem, of course, and PitStop is best viewed as a production program, whose interactive tools are best seen as the cogs in a system of automated corrections, brought to bear by Action Lists and PDF Profiles to process PDFs for reliable, certifiable results. Used as such, this program pays for itself in no time flat, because last-minute problems are always the most expensive.
