Callas Software releases pdfToolbox 7

This new version is a significant step forward in making PDF quality control and production workflows more accurate. The core PDF and font libraries in pdfToolbox have received a major update to improve speed and reliability of processing troublesome PDF files. The more compact and adjustable preflight report improves clear communication with customers, and the operator checkpoints allow manual intervention in automated workflows.

Fully customise your preflight report
Preflight reports for internal use or for customers should be nice, compact and allow for flexible adaption – e.g. to add a company logo. pdfToolbox 7 has a new report type that provides a much better and more attractive overview and that is highly customisable.

Operator intervention in an automated workflow
Even in fully automated workflows human intervention is sometimes required. The new checkpoint feature of pdfToolbox Server allows you to define workflow steps that submit files to pdfToolbox Desktop instances over the network. Operators can then easily verify whether certain automatic corrections were made as intended or jump in to make manual changes.

Radically improved transparency and font engines
Transparency is still an issue in many of today’s prepress workflows. pdfToolbox 7 has smoother results and better performance.There are similar problems with overprinting objects. This is not a general issue but some workflows have problems with rather complex objects. It is now possible to flatten overprinting objects in the same way as transparent objects.
One of the most error prone fields is with regards to fonts. pdfToolbox 7 is based on a completely new font engine with enhanced conversion capabilities, better stability and higher performance.

Clean up your PDF files 
You can now crop pages to the visible area disregarding invisible objects or invisible parts of objects with more accurate results.
It is now possible to hard crop images to their visible part, optionally also cropping those parts of the image outside the bleed-box for example.
You can remove arbitrary page objects e.g. a die line that should not show up on a printing plate.
Object level metadata that sometimes bloats PDF files can easily be removed.

Summary of new preflight features:
Calculate the total area coverage of each separation in a PDF file (for cost calculation for example).

Compare two PDF documents or a specific number of separations from two PDF documents, so that it is possible to only compare the non-black channels (non textual objects) or only the black channel (only the text) without modifying the PDF beforehand.
Count the number of separations generated by a PDF file.
Determine the x-height of text. This is based on the new EU regulation for text size on packaging material. As the required text size is defined as x-height, which is different from the regular text size, new checks are required.