(March 2006) posted on Thu Mar 16, 2006 A look at Acrobat Pro, Enfocus PitStop, Apago PDF Enhancer, and Callas pdfColorConvert.
By Stephen Beals
Four tools
Lucky for us, however, there's a growing arsenal of PDF-editing
tools on the market that can make working with PDF files
much easier. let's take a look at four of these, including: Adobe
Acrobat Professional, Enfocus Pitstop, Apago PDF Enhancer,
and Callas pdfColorConvert. and while there are also several
third-party products available for helping with the creation of
PDF files, I'll hold these for a future column.
- Adobe Acrobat Professional: adobe (www.adobe.com)
has a couple of different versions of the acrobat product
that include Distiller. The more you pay for acrobat, the more
features you get, and a print professional probably should
buy the complete package. If you are still using acrobat 6, or
even the standard version of acrobat 7, you are missing dozens
of production tools. acrobat 7 Pro gives the user several
tools specifically for print output including the ability to print
composites, flatten live transparency, fix hairline rules, and
convert colors to CMYK. The Pro version also lets you optimize
compression and resolution of images and create large-format
(aRCH, aNsI, IsO, and JIs) PDF files. Price: $449, for Mac
and Windows platforms.
- Enfocus PitStop Professional: Pitstop Professional, from
Enfocus (www.enfocus.com) is undoubtedly the most universal
PDF editing tool on the market. While acrobat Professional
now allows RGB-to-CMYK conversion and hairline correction,
it still has issues and these can only be resolved with a thirdparty
plug-in. Pitstop allows you to add and edit text in PDF
documents, although it is not a perfect solution due to the
nature of PDF files. (PDF tends to break up lines of text into
segments, which inhibits the ability to make changes; also, if
the complete font is not embedded and is not available, you
may not be able to make changes if the specific text you want
to change is not available to the system.)
