I was asked to do a presentation for one of our clients, the ROC Friese Poort (a Graphic Design education) some time ago. The topic they’d like me to talk about was “what are Certified PDF files and how do you create them. I stumbled up on the Keynote files a few weeks ago and decided to put them up on SlideShare. I talk about the basics, the costs of ads in newspapers and what the main advantage of Certified PDF is. Read more

The strangest thing just happened (twice!) last week and with atwork for a large client. This artwork got send out as Certified PDF. An Art Director set up a quick design and a pre-press guy added the final corrections, made sure everything aligned and he exported a PDF using the presets in InDesign. It got certified using InstantPDF and the App approved the PDF. When we saw the printed Ad several days later it contained an image with a very low resolution. That is NOT suppose to happen! InstantPDF can detect low resolution images and will definitely not approve any Certified PDF containing a low res image. But somehow it had approved this PDF and the other one. What the hell was going on here? Read more

In 2008 Enfocus wanted to find out who exactly their clients were. They held a survey. 4.840 users responded. Now who was using what kind of software and on what platform? Where do they live? What’s their primary business? How frequently do they use PDF-files? Do they even check incoming PDF files? And… what were the errors those files contained? Read more

Pitstop Professional is one of the apps most pre-press departments use to check incoming PDF’s. Apart from checking you can also use it to correct PDF’s. But because it’s such a flexible tool it can also be kind of scary to use at first. That’s why I’m glad Enfocus decided to release serveral short video’s showing you exactly how to perform some of the most common actions. This episode demonstrates how you can use Pitstop Professional to ‘Detect and fix objects without bleed’. They’ve got some more video’s and they’ll be uploading a new one every week.
Somewhat off-topic but if you listen to the voice-over you’ll know how Dutch –and Belgium– people pronounce English. What do you think? Does we sound like Borat or more like Femke Janssen?

Enfocus has just announced the Pitstop Extreme Webinar on April 9th from 3-4PM (GMT+1). I’ve had a chance to play with Pitstop Extreme a little bit during last year’s IFRA in Amsterdam and I was impressed. Dimitri from Enfocus was kind enough to let me create a few screenshots of the interface and I’ve uploaded them here. Pitstop Extreme is basically ‘Pitstop’ and ‘Neo’ (a stand-alone PDF editing tool) combined. For those of you not in the know, the ‘Neo-engine’ of Pitstop Extreme is almost like an Illustrator on steroids. Of course you can open a PDF file in Illustrator but you’ll probably get all sorts of errors; mising fonts, mising images, sliced images (because of flattening), wrong color-mode… Pitstop Extreme (and Neo) won’t give you those troubles and let you edit the PDF (even the textflow) and save the PDF without worries. (It works with flattened PDF 1.3 files as well!). Click here to sign up for the Webinar. Read more

I’ve been aware of Enfocus SWITCH for some time but I felt I didn’t need it. It’s basically ‘easy to use and install automation software’. That sound pretty vague, I know. Now I don’t run a pre-press department for a large print-house. I don’t control large workflows with incoming PDF-files. But because everything I produce will eventually get send out as a certified PDF I did find a way for SWITCH to help my clients out and make my work a lot easier. Read more