Review: Enfocus Pitstop Extreme 2008
- Article 15 of 16
- Macworld, March 2009
Fix PDFs when your deadline is tight
Just about everyone working in pre-press or production will know what a nightmare it is to discover there's a problem with a PDF and it needs fixing. With Sod's Law usually in action, the designer who produced the PDF will be ill, the client who made the ad wouldn't know what transparency was if you showed it to him or the picture server's offline and you can't re-generate the PDF. If Acrobat Professional were just a little more helpful, maybe this wouldn't be such a problem; however, it's not and editing the text or layout in PDFs is nigh on impossible beyond very basic tweaks.
Enfocus Pitstop Extreme makes editing and then preflighting PDFs about as easy as creating a layout in Quark or InDesign. Open a PDF and after a somewhat lengthy wait, you'll suddenly have a completely editable document, with an interface somewhat reminiscent of golden older Illustrator 3, albeit with some slightly odd shortcuts. You can edit text, move, scale and rotate objects, change transparency, insert pages, change fill colours, edit bleed, place images - the whole kit and caboodle. After you're done, it will let you preflight the document according to your chosen profile, and then save it, all without changing any metadata if you don't want - although that's always an option. And if you suspect you're going to be doing the same changes to a lot of PDFs, you can set up Photoshop-like actions for automation.
Okay, it can't work wonders. If you don't have a font installed and the PDF doesn't have all the necessary glyphs for the next text embedded, it's not going to be able to do anything. Depending on how the document was created and what layering's involved, certain objects may prove uneditable or even to be several composite objects you won't be able to change easily. Its colour spaces also stop at CMYK, so don't expect to be able to add spot colours and varnishes.
Slightly more tediously, it has its own set of profiles for preflighting and can't import Acrobat profiles; while it has a good set, some of which are downloadable from the Enfocus web site, if you have a custom profile provided by your printer, you'll have to manually tweak the settings.
At £2,380, this is a colossally expensive program and you really have to be expecting a whole lot of production disasters to be coming your way on some really expensive projects to be able to justify it. Nevertheless, while it's not quite as powerful in some areas as you'd hope, it far exceeds Acrobat's editing puny toolset and could well save your bacon one day.