May 29, 2008 - Gent, Belgium - In a landmark decision for the global prepress industry, Enfocus is making its Certified PDF specification public and available to third party developers.

On the first day of drupa, Peter Camps, Senior Vice President of Enfocus, announced the public availability of the Enfocus Certified PDF specification. “Following the EskoArtwork acquisition of Gradual Software and the establishment of the new Enfocus Business Unit, we’re proud to be able to make this important announcement to open up the Certified PDF technology to other vendors,” he said. “This will enable more vendors to support Certified PDF, leading to a wider choice of applications with embedded Certified PDF technology. This initiative is in line with our company mission to offer end-to-end automation solutions to the graphic arts and publishing sectors in collaboration with other vendors.”
  
Certified PDF has been integrated into the Enfocus product line since 2002. By embedding authoring, transfer, editing, preflight and ‘undo’ information into a PDF, it provides an end-to-end audit of the work file throughout its lifetime, from its creation to output and archiving.
 
The Certified PDF specification will be made available publicly on the Enfocus partners website. Enfocus will also provide royalty-free implementation rights to all other vendors so that they can take advantage of the Certified PDF technology.
 
Like Adobe with its recently published PDF specification, Enfocus will retain full intellectual property rights to Certified PDF.
 
What is Certified PDF?
Certified PDF was developed by Enfocus in response to the uncertainties of handling PDF files in a graphic arts environment. Originally it was impossible to check whether or not a PDF file’s contents had been checked against a preflight profile, or what the results of any checks had been. Certified PDF provides an audit trail for the lifetime of the PDF document and is well integrated with preflight checking and verification. This is particularly useful when the file is transferred from one site to another: typically between a design or publishing house and a pre-press or printing company. 
 
“Certified PDF is one of the core Enfocus technologies designed to ensure and track the quality of PDF documents throughout a complete workflow”, stated David van Driessche, Director of Enfocus Marketing. "A Certified PDF document always 'knows' whether it has been preflighted or not, and which preflight profile was used - or even if there have been several preflight checks with different profiles and results. It can also detect whether the document was changed after its last preflight, and it can not only list the edits but it allows authorized users to reverse the changes and return the document to an earlier state," he continued.
Certified PDF guarantees that a PDF document is verified, or preflighted, against a given specification. It maintains a history of document changes throughout the workflow, and it pinpoints the edits to a particular person or computer. 
 
This information is embedded as metadata within the PDF document itself and updated every time the PDF is changed by a program that supports the Certified PDF technology. 
 
Until now Certified PDF has been closely linked with Enfocus’ own preflight solutions, including Instant PDF, PitStop Professional, and PitStop Server. These can create, track and update the Certified PDF information and embed it into PDFs. Several pre-press developers, for example Agfa, Screen and EskoArtwork, can already access Certified PDF within the preflight components of their automated workflows. Enfocus also offers its free StatusCheck plug-in for Adobe®  Acrobat®  and Adobe®  Reader®, which allow anyone to view the information within a Certified PDF. 
 
Now that the specifications are publicly available, third party developers will be able to create and support Certified PDFs in the same way. 
 
“The Certified PDF specification will continue to be developed in the future,” emphasized Mr. Camps. “Enfocus aims to evolve these specifications in collaboration with third parties and industry organizations such as the Ghent PDF workgroup.”
 
Benefits for end-users
“By its very nature, the PDF market has always been an ecosystem defined and driven by public availability of all relevant specifications.” stated Olaf Drümmer, Managing Director of Callas Software, a developer of PDF programs and technologies. "It is very encouraging to see Enfocus now opening up Certified PDF, thus aligning it with the spirit of the PDF world. I am confident that both Enfocus as well as other vendors and most importantly customers will benefit from this move.” concluded Mr. Drümmer.

All Enfocus products are available for download from www.enfocus.com or via the Enfocus distributors and resellers.