With Adobe Systems Inc.’s portable document format winning almost universal adoption among newspapers, it’s only natural that production directors would demand Adobe pump up the app’s versatility.

To that end, the company’s recent upgrade of Adobe Acrobat added preflighting to the newly engineered Adobe Acrobat Professional (see Newspapers & Technology, June 2003).

Adobe Product Manager Gray Knowlton said customers wanted built-in preflighting to authenticate their PDF files. Previously, preflighting was offered through InProduction, a now-discontinued plug-in.

“People can examine a PDF and tell how it was created, who created it what jobs were used for creating that PDF,” Knowlton said of Professional’s new functionality.

Knowlton said Acrobat’s preflighting goes beyond verifying format elements. “This will allow users to check for compliance with a specific condition.”

Users can configure the toolset to accommodate their own workflows, such as ensuring that RIPs can process the PDFs they receive.

Acrobat 6 Professional can check for the compliance of PDF X-compatible files. Users can select among 400 options to check the conditions within a PDF, ranging from checking font properties to determining whether or not a compressed object stream exists.

“One of the most important aspects in newspaper production is ensuring the incoming content is accurate,” he said. “If you are taking advertising from a wire service in PDF, you want to use preflight to make sure that those PDF files are going to grip on the RIPs,” Knowlton said.

The app also supports PDF 1.5, which Adobe says features a more robust internal compression algorithm. The standard also lets users add rich media formats such as MP3 and QuickTime to PDF files.

Preflight results reports are embedded within the PDFs, providing the creator with information detailing what might be wrong with a particular file.