User guide

Chapter 5: Working with Certified PDF documents62
About Certified PDF
What is Certified PDF?
Certified PDF is a PDF workflow concept developed
by Enfocus based on customer requests and feed-
back from industry experts.
Three vital issues solved
The Certified PDF concept has been designed to
address three fundamental issues faced by the
majority of users implementing a PDF workflow:
• How to guarantee that a PDF document was
successfully preflighted with a specific
Preflight Profile.
• How to maintain consistency between the
source document(s) and the PDF document
when (minor) changes can be applied to the
PDF document throughout the workflow.
• How to minimize risk and have certainty
about responsibility when changing a
customer’s PDF document before final output.
See also:
• “Guaranteed Preflighting” on page 62
• “Document Consistency” on page 64
• “Responsibility” on page 65
Guaranteed Preflighting
Preflighting Issues
“Preflighting” is the process of checking a PDF doc-
ument against various criteria to ensure that the
PDF document meets all the requirements for out-
put or publication. Typically, the criteria vary
depending on the output or publishing process. A
set of criteria matching the requirements of a par-
ticular process is called a Preflight Profile.
Using Preflight Profiles
Enfocus PitStop Pro and Enfocus PitStop Server, for
example, allow you to create a Preflight Profile that
checks your PDF document against various criteria,
such as color and font usage. Moreover, you can use
the Preflight Profile to actually fix detected prob-
lems in your PDF documents.
Preflighting and Your Workflow
Ideally, a PDF document should be preflighted at an
early stage in a workflow, i.e. as soon as it has
been created. This is particularly true if the PDF
document will move from the PDF document pro-
vider, who created the PDF document, to the PDF
document recipient, e.g. a publishing or printing
department. Detecting problems in the PDF docu-
ment before the file leaves the PDF document pro-
vider saves time (and money). Even more so, when
the PDF file is sent to a different physical location.
Preflighting in a Certified PDF workflow
A Certified PDF workflow supports the preflight pro-
cess by:
• Offering the PDF document provider a simple
and streamlined way to preflight a PDF docu-
ment with a Preflight Profile supplied by the
PDF document recipient.
• Including the Preflight Profile and the corre-
sponding preflight report in the PDF docu-
ment. This way there can be no doubt about
the preflight status of the PDF document.
InstantPDF.book Page 62 Wednesday, June 9, 2010 4:04 PM