Case Study: With a deadline looming on a client's $453 million buyout deal, a New Zealand agency uses Callas' pdfColorConvert to process almost 50 PDFs in less than an hour.Paul Gerrard, founder and CEO of Pageworks Design, a full-service graphic design and print production agency, was facing a substantial challenge in PDF conversion. A client with a crucial project had delivered nearly 50 PDFs in RGB, produced from Word on a PC, and they needed to be converted to process black Macintosh-ready PDFs. Immediately.
"We had a scenario of putting together shareholder notification documents representing a share buyout offer, and we had to do it very quickly," Gerrard said. "We were under a deadline to process all these docs and turn them around to the financial houses. Everyone was behind in getting the docs to us, and there were deadlines that could not be missed set by the financial commission overseeing the process."
The documents represented what ultimately became a successful takeover deal with ING Property Trust Holdings Ltd. buying Urbus Properties Ltd. The Urbus investors received a 35-page offer document, a 76-page prospectus and a 68-page company statement. ING had to notify and secure 11,000 acceptances from Urbus shareholders.
Already under a very tight turnaround deadline, Gerrard had hoped that Pageworks' part of the process would be simple.
"Even with the tight deadlines, initially we were under the impression this was going to be an easy job of just converting PDFs and placing them into an InDesign document for supply as hi-res PDFs to the printer," said Gerrard.
"While PDF means Portable Document Format, if you don't write them correctly or save them correctly, it doesn't mean they're going to be usable. I use the metaphor if you've got a big bag of garbage and tie it in a bow [PDF file], the bow is nice and attractive, but it's still tied around a big bag of garbage," Gerrard said.
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Pageworks, a midsize company in Auckland, New Zealand, utilizes an OS X Tiger v.10.4.1 platform with 10 Macintosh computers and only one PC and was at the time running Adobe Acrobat 6.0.
"We were desperate to find a tool in a matter of minutes that could convert these files," said Gerrard.
Gerrard recalled reading about PDF conversion tools from PDF newsletters and, determined to complete the job, he sat down at his Mac and began an online search in haste for a tool that he could use to convert the files.
"I did a search for PDF conversion and pdfColorConvert came up listed as a tool, and I clicked on it. And there we sat watching the screen as we downloaded the free demo version first. We tried it out and in seconds had completely converted a page in the doc and were absolutely thrilled," said Gerrard.
With over 40 PDF documents left to convert, Gerrard downloaded the unlimited edition version of the PDF color correction and PDF editing tool.
"We bought the license unlimited version immediately and literally went from being in a bit of a panic, and not being sure at all what we were going to do, to an hour later from the install of the full version having our problem completely solved."
pdfColorConvert is a color conversion plug-in for Adobe Acrobat 6 and 7 created by Berlin-based Callas Software. The plug-in converts RGB/Lab data and determines colors within PDF documents for boosted color matching output. pdfColorConvert is primarily used by prepress agencies, print bureaus and graphic design shops.
A single-user license for pdfColorConvert costs $365.
Next Page: Rapid conversion saves major job.
Gerrard's use of pdfColorConvert contributed to ING Property Trust's successful takeover buyout worth an estimated $453 million. The merged entity represents the second largest merger of real estate trusts, representing what some financial analysts estimate could be a combined $800 million property business.
"Time is money," Gerrard said. "In this case, if we had not been able to convert those documents for InDesign, it would have impacted not only our ability to serve our customers, but on a much larger scale, it would seriously have set back the ability of this multimillion-dollar takeover to meet the notification deadlines it had to for all the shareholders to be made aware of what was going to happen."
"pdfColorConvert saved us eight to 10 painstaking hours that we would have spent converting these documents. It reduced that time to less than an hour," said Gerrard.
For Gerrard, not only did the plug-in save the job, it gave him unmatched time-saving conversion results and the confidence that Pageworks would be successful in tackling any future conversion issues with great ease and, most importantly, speed.
"In the past we've had some problems with PDFs because of their ubiquitous usage and people rampantly saving everything to PDFs. But if you look at it from a printing and workflow perspective, it's still very difficult to break down PDFs, and cross-platform incompatibility is still a major issue.
"When we talk about PDFs in our industry, we liken the lack of knowledge base out there to giving folks one lesson in an airplane and then telling them to land it. PDFs are a wonderful tool, but you still have to know how to land them without crashing," said Gerrard.
In the future, with its use of pdfColorConvert, Gerrard predicts only smooth landings.
