Real-time PDF Preflight

 

Catching errors in your documents early on saves you huge amounts of time later on in your production workflow. This counts for files provided by your customers, but also for files created by yourselves.

And once errors are found, they should be reported. For your internal workflows you want technical information that comes out of the pdf preflighting action. You can handle this information, and you know how to respond to it.

But end users (for example when uploading files on your print portal) might not have the same expertise. They are much better served with a simple view which informs them where problems were found, which they can then use as feedback to the content creators.

 

callas pdfToolbox


callas pdfToolbox provides a whole range of functionalities to our online workflow environment, and much of that has been ported to the FLO Media Viewer product.

callas has years of experience on the sharp end of PDF preflighting. In fact, they are responsible for the preflight option in Adobe Acrobat itself.

 

Customizable Profiles


One of the greatest features of callas pdfToolbox (besides its ease of integration, which is of course only interesting for us) is the interface for building new preflight profiles. You can either use the Acrobat functions for this, or you can use the incredibly user-friendly pdfToolbox plug-in.

A profile contains all of the settings on which you want to check incoming PDF files. You can use one of a whole range of supplied profiles, or you can create them completely customized to your own production environment.

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Preflight error visualization


The reports generated by callas pdfToolbox are easy to use in their own right. You can have the system generate HTML reports, masked PDF files, PDF files with annotations, or very comprehensive XML reports.

These last are used by FLO Media Viewer. You can select a preflight profile from disk, and automatically have the viewer:

  • Preflight the PDF
  • Generate a flash viewer of the file
  • Overlay the pages with the found problems

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