Ghent, Belgium – A recent study carried out by VIGC, an independent Belgian organization focused on the graphic arts market, has confirmed that the PDF opening and preflighting times of Enfocus PitStop Pro have dramatically improved compared to earlier versions of the software. Customers using newer versions of the popular PDF preflight and editing software can now preflight PDFs up to one-third of the time faster as compared to previous versions of PitStop Pro . The opening time of PDFs also went down substantially.

In today's demanding prepress environment, print service providers are continuously seeking ways to streamline their production processes – and output more jobs in less time, with fewer errors. Preflighting tools such as Enfocus PitStop Pro are instrumental in controlling the quality of PDF files for print, and significantly reducing the time required to perform this critical task. Over recent years, Enfocus has continued to invest heavily in further improving the speed of the PitStop family. Results from research carried out recently by the Flemish Innovation Center for Graphic Communication (VIGC) confirm that the latest version of PitStop Pro offers a dramatic improvement over older versions, in both PDF opening and preflighting times.

VIGC Confirms that Customer-Requested Changes are Significant

"Some customers with older versions, like PitStop Pro 7 and 08, did find the opening times of Certified PDF files to be slower than other PDFs. A few also felt the preflighting of PDFs seemed to take longer than expected. We took this feedback on board and invested significant time and resources over the last few years to improve the speed of PitStop Pro," says Elli Cloots, Director of Product Management at Enfocus. "We felt, however it was important to ask an independent third party to validate whether these improvements can be seen in practice. We are extremely pleased with the results of the study, which confirms our internal testing. And the good news is that customers with older versions can now upgrade to take advantage of the improved speeds."

Research conclusions

VIGC carried out the research with different versions of Enfocus PitStop Pro on different platforms and Adobe Acrobat versions. For each combination, several tests were performed and each test was done three times.

The results show that instead of 5 to 6 seconds when using PitStop Pro 7 and 08, it now only takes 2 to 3 seconds to open PDF files with the latest versions of the software. In the past, there had been a significant difference between opening a random PDF file and a Certified PDF file. This difference has also declined considerably. The research also confirmed a dramatic improvement in the preflight time itself. With recent PitStop Pro versions, the time to preflight a PDF file has halved compared to PitStop Pro versions 7 and 08. On a PC it is even faster – needing only one third of the time.