REVIEW: PitStop Professional 7

A GUI Facelift

By Julie Shaffer

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Beyond the prettier (but still purple) PitStop toolbar icons (see Figure 1), some toolbar options have been added and others removed. I thought the old Action List and PDF Profile toolbars took up too much toolbar real estate and always hid them. These have been replaced with a spanking new toolbar-accessible option called QuickRun. A QuickRun is something like a macro that can be made up of multiple Actions plus a single PDF Profile, accessible with a single click on a toolbar icon (see Figure 2). Unlike many other plug-ins, PitStop Professional tools could never be automated through Acrobat's Batch Sequence feature and QuickRun appears to be an answer to user requests for some kind of PitStop batch processing option within Acrobat.

Figure 1. PitStop toolbar icons

Figure 2. QuickRun dialog

One of the most noticeable interface enhancements in PitStop 7 is to the Global Change Panel. Showing folks how to add bleed to a PDF file is a mainstay of my PDF seminars, partly because altering the page boxes in a PDF file through the Global Change Panel in earlier versions of PitStop was simply not a very intuitive process. While the functionality of Global Change in version 7 is virtually the same, the interface is very different. It is now organized by category, including potential changes of page related issues, images, text, color, prepress functions and transformations (see Figure 3). Users click a category button to display the specific change options available within that area. Once a change option is selected from the list, it can be customized on a step-by-step basis through a wizard-like interface. While I have to admit I found the radical change from the old interface a bit disorienting at first, I've come to appreciate how much better organized and user-friendly it is, especially for new users.

Figure 3. Global Change Panel

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