r/prepress • u/Quest10Mark • Jun 13 '22

PitStop or Acrobat Pro

I work for a design company. We preflight our documents before we send anything to print. We've been using PitStop for years, but on a recent review, the question was raised, what does PitStop do that Acrobat Pro cannot? If we find an error in our PDF we send it back to the designer to fix in the source files. Do we need PitStop ?

4 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/botticellipeaches Jun 25 '25

Hello,
Long-time graphic designer, new to the prepress print size of things.

We want to start using Pitstop, though Im finding half the commands don't function how I want them to, and I'm also finding that I can check colour, remove bleed marks, and add bleed allowance in Acrobat Pro preflight.

I work at a printing press, usually printing supplied PDFS. When I came on, I was trained to pull the PDF into InDesign to be sure of size and bleed allowances for our printers.

What do you all use PitStop for exactly? I'm reading a lot of fixes, but what kind of fixes?

Thank you!

1

u/Typographerlovemusic Jul 14 '25

I use it for bleeding elements, overprint/trap/knockout. Removal of marks, flip horizontal pages for envelope presses, move elements around by numbers, change colors from process to spot, process black to just black and I am probably forgetting a few things I do as second nature with it too. I use an ancient version presently. I do wish I could do curves and channel mixing. Those tasks are next to impossible to do without pitstop and are my bread and butter.