Prepress

HTML-based customizable reports now also available in pdfToolbox Desktop

Tuesday 28. January 2014 - after raving customer feedback on pdfToolbox 7, callas software today issues an important maintenance release. This release makes the new customizable - and HTML-based - preflight report available in pdfToolbox Desktop as well as Server and adjusts a number of new features in pdfToolbox 7 based on customer requests.

“Releasing a major pdfToolbox version with completely novel concepts always stimulates our customers to come up with creative ways in which they want to use those features,” says Dietrich von Seggern, Business Development Manager at callas software: “we’ve always valued that feedback tremendously and it feels good to be able to react this quickly and come up with an important update only a few months after pdfToolbox 7 was released.”
Customizable Reports
pdfToolbox 7 introduces a completely new preflight report format. Based on an HTML template, it allows easy and thorough customization of the complete report. “It’s not just about providing your own colors and company branding,” comments Dietrich von Seggern: “Because this new report is based on HTML and CSS, it’s very easy to modify. But more importantly it also allows the use of JavaScript and has access to a lot of preflight information generated by pdfToolbox. So not only can you modify the look and feel of the report, you can really customize the content as well. Reducing complexity of the report if your audience needs that for example, or including specific information missing from the default report.”
The new report starts from a template consisting of an HTML file, CSS and JavaScript and can be easily adjusted using common HTML tools. That template is converted to a good, printable PDF file on the fly by callas pdfToolbox whenever a PDF document is preflighted and a preflight report is generated. Starting with this pdfToolbox update, the options of the new report format are further extended and it can now be used in pdfToolbox Desktop.
Performance improvements
The new pdfToolbox update also introduces various performance improvements. These are mainly important for Process Plans, the preflight profile variant introduced in pdfToolbox 6 that allows multiple conditional steps to be executed on PDF files. There are also a number of important changes related to Mac OS X 10.9; when Apple released Mavericks it changed some system components significantly and this update optimizes support for the operating system.
Expanded functionality
Some of the new preflight checks and fixes received a warm welcome by the user community and as a result of early feedback have been expanded in this update. A good example of this is the new fixup that allows adding line-art elements on or in relation to the different page boxes in a PDF document. This would for example allow for overlaying a rectangle on top of the trim or bleed box in a PDF document in a specific layer or using a specific spot color.