Clearwater, FL & London, UK – DistributorX, the technology channel source, announces the release and availability of the new Enfocus PitStop 12. PitStop Pro 12 and PitStop Server 12 include powerful new features that make the already indispensable software even more of a value.

As Enfocus looked to improve and expand the functionality of PitStop, they turned to their 130,000 strong user base for feedback, conducting customer surveys, “Voice of the Customer” interviews, and reaching out to customers via social media and LinkedIn forums.

Fabian Prudhomme, Vice President of Enfocus, talked about customer involvement in the release of PitStop 12: “PitStop 12 is a result of Enfocus’ commitment to developing solutions based directly on customers’ needs. As a result, PitStop 12 has evolved into a simple but extremely powerful ‘pocket knife’ of technology that can manipulate everything in a PDF, without opening a new application.”

PitStop Pro 12 includes new editing tools that let users edit and correct images and blends without having to leave PitStop Pro and go into an external editor such as Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) or Illustrator(R). Once changes are made to images, users can immediately preview the results, saving them crucial time when it matters.

PitStop Pro 12 can even edit images that cannot be easily edited in any other way, such as those that include spot color, duotone, tritone and other Device-N color spaces. Image adjustments can be applied to single images, multiple images, or all images within a PDF file. The functions of the new image editing and enhancement tools include:

Image curve editing
Enables the user to work on the entire image or on individual separations depending on the required color correction. Users can make adjustments to the highlights, quarter tones, or shadows. Extra curve control points can be added to a curve to make more precise adjustments, or the input and output percentage values of a curve control point can be adjusted using precise values.

Brightness/Contrast adjustment
This new option in the Inspector allows the overall image brightness and/or contrast to be adjusted to increase the quality of the selected images.

Unsharp Masking (USM)
This can selectively sharpen any or all images, with standard controls for amount, radius and threshold of the effect.

Blend editing (shadings, gradients, vignettes)
Existing blends within a PDF can now be adjusted and corrected, or deleted and replaced. Existing fills or strokes can be converted to a blend, and replacing a blend with a newly created blend to eliminate banding in the original is also possible. This powerful new tool includes features to change the start/end points of blends, change the rotation of the blend, switch between linear and radial shading, add new control points and colors, and change blend colors.

Editing controls can be saved as Actions
Edits to image color curves can be recorded as Actions and can be used for automatic correction. Unsharp Masking and Brightness/Contrast are also available as Actions for automatic adjustment of images. These Actions can be incorporated into Action Lists and can be used in both PitStop Pro and PitStop Server.

The new PitStop Server 12 now uses the industry standard Adobe transparency flattening engine. This ensures consistency with flattening performed externally in Adobe Creative Suite(R) or APPE pre-press workflows. It also benefits from the extended image enhancement features of PitStop Pro 12. The new PitStop Server 12 is supplied with two new automatic image enhancement Actions: Brightness/Contrast and Unsharp Masking. It can also use recorded image curve editing Actions from PitStop Pro.

Both Windows and Mac OS X versions of PitStop Server 12 are now fully 64-bit enabled, which allow them access to the maximum amount of RAM available on the processing platform. This is important for faster processing of very large or complex PDF files.

Both PitStop Pro and Server 12 gain Brazilian Portuguese as an additional language option. This is available in both the menus and the Preflight Reports.

PitStop Pro 12 and PitStop Server 12 also address the number one obstacle to correcting PDFs for production: missing fonts. Customers now have the option to connect to the new Monotype Baseline(TM) platform, a new cloud-based service solution, when missing fonts are detected. Licensing the font for a special introductory rate of $1.49 per font, per document, permits embedding of the font in the file, thereby allowing it to pass preflight and print successfully. Purchased fonts will be documented in PitStop preflight reports, and in the user account history with Monotype. As part of the terms of the agreement, Enfocus currently has exclusive rights to offer the Monotype solution for use in preflight.

Enfocus Vice President Fabian Prudhomme says that the agreement with Monotype is “the crowning achievement on the most important PitStop family update in years. “With the Monotype Baseline(TM) platform, we’re bringing customers the spoils of the biggest, longest battle on the PDF production front: missing fonts. We’ve won.”

Other powerful new features include:
* Align and Distribute – The new Align and Distribute functionality allows multiple selected objects to be easily aligned or equally spaced. Objects can be automatically rearranged so they align to common left, right, top or bottom edges, or vertically, or horizontally to a common center.
* Group/Ungroup – Multiple objects within a PDF file can now be selected by the user and grouped together. A group object can then be edited as a single object and also used with the Align and Distribute tools. Grouped objects can also be cut and pasted between PDF documents and the group will remain in the new document, making moving objects much simpler and straightforward.
* Ink usage reporting – Users can generate a report containing the amount of ink or toner required to print a page or an entire document. This new report can be generated as part of the Preflight report or as an independent action.
* Check font size by lowercase x-height – A new European Union regulation (No. 1169/2011 effective December 13th 2014) specifies minimum font size requirements for the nutrition declaration on food packaging, based on the lowercase x-height of the font as it is designed to guarantee legibility. This new action in PitStop allows type size to be checked in this way.
* Check for white overprinting objects – This check looks for white line art objects that overprint. There is also a fix available within the preflight profile to make offending elements knockout automatically.

Also available are new Actions and Action List Functions that include:
* An Action to remove empty layers.
* An action to allow layers to be flattened to their current view rather than the default view.
* A new Action that converts content in Form Fields to normal printable content removing any output issues that may exist with Form Fields.

Customers wishing to obtain more information or to purchase PitStop Pro 12 or PitStop Server 12, can contact an authorized Enfocus reseller via the product links below. Resellers who are interested in being able to offer the Enfocus product range can contact DistributorX at the provided link below.

PitStop Pro 12 (North America)
PitStop Server 12 (North America)
PitStop Pro 12 (UK & Ireland)
PitStop Server 12 (UK & Ireland)
Become a DistributorX Reseller

DistributorX distributes products to a wide range of resellers in the corporate, commercial, creative, print, publishing and design sectors and are authorized distributors for Enfocus, FFEI, Global Graphics and Quark. DistributorX represents prepress and extended technology vendors of PDF and workflow solutions, QuarkXTension(R) solutions; InDesign(R), Acrobat(R), Illustrator(R) and Photoshop(R) Plug-ins(R) and other complementary utilities. Copyright (C) 2013 DistributorX. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo and Mac OS X platforms are trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.