User guide

Table Of Contents

Chapter 5: Working with Certified PDF documents66

The Certified PDF Workflow

Explained

Principles of a Certified PDF Workflow

The Certified PDF workflow is based on the follow-

ing principles:

• Guaranteed preflighting

•The Incremental save principle

•A robust Roll-back mechanism

The illustration shows how a PDF document is pre-

flighted and becomes a Certified PDF document

after each editing session.

Incremental save

In the Certified PDF workflow, all the modifications

done in a Certified PDF document are logged per

session and saved in an edit log file. Also, the

edited Certified PDF documents can be saved incre-

mentally. This means that the changes done in

version 3, for example, are saved “on top of” the

changes done in version 2 but you keep one physi-

cal PDF file.

Thanks to the incremental save principle, the file

size of your Certified PDF document does not

increase drastically as it is edited further on in the

workflow. Adobe Acrobat only saves the changes

made during the different sessions.

Roll-back mechanism

The Certified PDF workflow also offers you a robust

roll-back mechanism. Each time someone edits

your Certified PDF document at a later stage, for

example using Enfocus PitStop Pro, a “snapshot”

will be included in the file. You may think of a

snapshot as an “image” of the state of the PDF

document at the time it was saved. This allows the

user to any previous stage in the Certified PDF

workflow and to compare different versions of your

PDF document, even though he or she maintains

one physical PDF file.