"PDF Proofing"

By Leah Lothringer
PDF Store Support Team
Issue 14 for 2006

During my time with PDF Store, I’ve been exposed to a large cross-section of users and they all work with PDF in different ways, whether it be the purpose, workflow, output technology and so forth. Everybody has their own standards and requirements as to how a document should look. For example, you need to send your document to a printer. They receive your document and report that they are unable to print it as the image resolution is too low, even though it looks fine to you. Worse, a printer may go ahead and print the document, resulting in a low-quality product. Mistakes like this are costly and frustrating, all the more because they can be prevented. Proofing your PDF documents ensures that they are absolutely portable and that there is no confusion about how the final copy should look.

The technical name is preflight, the testing and preparation of a digital file before it is sent off to print. Acrobat 6 and 7 Professional have some useful preflight features, including PDF/X compliance and PostScript level compliance and the ability to create a report detailing preflight issues.

The industry standard is considered to be PitStop Professional, a plug-in for Acrobat that offers an extensive range of preflight checks and automated correction capabilities. Unique profiles can be created and reused to check a PDF document according to a specific set of requirements.

Users working with very large document collections should also look at PitStop Server, which offers hot folder functionality.

The Planet PDF Learning Center resource has an entire area devoted to Preflight.

The complete range of PDF proofing products can be found in the Prepress/Print section at PDF Store.