Using Abrobat 9 for Preflighting PrePress

[ella138]

I got such great advice on this forum before, I'm going to take another shot at this.

I work for a newspaper. We were using Pitstop Professional to preflight all the files that come in from clients. Now that we have upgraded our whole design area from QuarkXPress to CS3, I was hoping to be able to use the built in preflight that Acrobat 9 has. I set up my own custom profile to try to emmulate our current pitstop preflight settings. When I use the "Analyze" button, t seems to flag all the right stuff, but when I use the "Analyze and Fix" button it doesn't seem to fix the items I have asked for it to fix.

For example I have a colour page that I need in grayscale. I used the convert to grayscale "fix" that is available in the Acrobat preflight. The report tells me that it converted all the objects to grayscale, but the page is clearly still in colour. I am wondering if it's just buggy or if i am doing something wrong.

I would hate to have to spend $3600 to upgrade the Pitstop Professional (for 9 people) if Acrobat will do the same thing.

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks
Ella

 

[SwiftLives]

I have not yet used Acrobat 9, so I am unsure of its preflighting capabilities. I'm fairly conservative when it comes to creating PDFs. I tend to avoid making any changes to the actual PDF. I'll only make the changes to the components that are used to create the PDF. It may be different in v9, but Acrobat tends to treat any cropping or alteration to the PDF as a 'layer,' and I've run into massive problems with that before.

However, if you're using InDesign, it has very basic built-in preflighting functionality. It will check and see if fonts are available and flag any images that are not print-ready. It will not explicitly flag low-resolution images, but it will display its effective resolution. IT won't automatically correct problems, either.

Out of curiosity, how does PitStop work into your workflow? What functionality do you get/need out of it?

 

[ella138]

Out of curiosity, how does PitStop work into your workflow? What functionality do you get/need out of it?

Pitstop is a preflight program that works like a plug-in in your Acrobat. It preflights anything you set for it to flag, it fixes anything you flag for it to fix and it will inspect areas of your pdf as well, to see resolution, file type, fonts, colour space, amongst tons of other things. It is an excellent preflight addition to any Acrobat version but it is quite expensive.

We have no need to preflight our own PDF's, as we make our PDF's press ready. What we need the preflight for is to check PDF's sent to the newspaper by outside clients. These days anyone with a computer can be a "graphic artist", but not everyone realizes that what looks good on a computer screen will not always print properly. A good preflight program with a properly custom set profile, will flag things that won't print because of wrong colour settings, fonts not embedded, low resolution files and even small type knocked out of 4 colours won't register properly on newsprint. All these things are red flags in the newspaper publishing business. Ads that look great in magazine may look like crap in newprint because of the dot gain and bleed of the newsprint.

I was hoping that we could get away with using the built in preflight in Acrobat 9. I'll see if anyone else has any suggestions.

 

[covisio]

Just tried to do the 'convert to greyscale' preflight you wanted to do, but in Acrobat Pro 8. It seemed to work perfectly.