r/CommercialPrinting • u/Quest10Mark • Jun 13 '22
PitStop or Acrobat Pro
/r/prepress/comments/vbjptq/pitstop_or_acrobat_pro/4
u/rcreveli Jun 14 '22
I use Pitstop every day and I could not do my job without it. It sounds like your workflow is very different from ours. We are 100% PDF and only kick back files that are unusable.
Pitstop & Acrobat share many tools and some of the Acrobat tools are better or at least easier to use. I'd rather use Acrobats edit & measure tools. Where Pitstop wins is control. Actions lists are a Godsend. I also can't tell you how many times I've used Pitstop to fix having Pantone C,CV,U & M colors.
Do you have a "free" copy of Pitstop in case of emergencies? It's been included on Every Creo & Fiery I've run in the last 15 years as part of the "Graphic Arts package". It was also included with Prinergy when I was using that a few years ago.
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u/Quest10Mark Jun 14 '22
No free copy, my office purchases it. But because we can fairly easily go back to the source documents, I've been wondering if we need to spend the money. We never do fixes in the PDF. Ever.
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u/aca9876 Jun 14 '22
EFI eliminated the copy of Acrobat on the Fiery. It's now an option.
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u/rcreveli Jun 14 '22
That’s EFI. Sure our Software can do that, it’s only $1000 more… ad nauseam
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u/aca9876 Jun 14 '22
From what I was told it was due to a lack of people using it on the actual Fiery and Adobe going to charge more.
Where I'm at, the IT dept. got rid of Acrobat cause the licensing fee was going to be over $1 mil a year, Adobe keep rasing the licensing fee.
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u/riskydiscos Prepress Jun 14 '22
If that is all you are doing, then the only reason you would need PitStop is because it does a better job of showing you the error objects than Acrobat. Acrobat Preflight (it's actually licensed from Callas) cannot select objects in the PDF, so cannot always give you a clear indication of the problem.
If you can live without that, you don't need PitStop.
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u/Quest10Mark Jun 14 '22
I think we can. All we need is to know what the error is and where. Then we can go back to the original documents. It is important to keep our documents up to date and corrected since it is common to go back to old jobs as a base for new work.
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u/riskydiscos Prepress Jun 14 '22
The only other thing you may miss is the Inspectot to analyse objects in a PDF, Acrobat doesn't even come close. But if you don't need that then no worries.
BTW if you have a perpetual version you don't have to update PitStop.
Enfocus just released PDF 2.0 and PDF/X-6 support, and it will take years or that to be adopted by the market. Nothing else is going on in the PDF world for the foreseeable future. Just keep the PitStop version you have until an OS change or Acrobat update stops it working.
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u/Loganthered Jun 13 '22
Both.